Signup forms are one of the most critical aspects of your website, but they can also be a huge pain. Every day we see sites that bots have spammed, and it’s time to talk about how to prevent this from happening to you.
In this post, we will go over some tips on what you can do as well as some good practices for preventing spam signups so that your site stays live and active. You don’t want to miss out on great opportunities because someone is trying to ruin them for you.
What Is An Email Signup Bot?
Email signup bot is a program that automatically fills email forms by submitting thousands of email addresses.
An email signup bot can be programmed to fill out the email form with any random combination it finds in web pages, emails, or chat messages. The email address will not belong to anyone but instead be generated and submitted at high volumes repeatedly until spam filters catch them or database errors occur. This type of attack poses as an opportunity for you to increase your mailing list, which may look like good marketing tactics initially but could severely hurt your business if large amounts are requested without consent.
What Can You Do About Email Signup Bot Spam?
Use A Double Opt-in Form
Wouldn’t it be great if you could protect your email list from bots and spammers by automatically confirming new signups? The way to do this is with a double opt-in process, which sends an automatic confirmation link after someone enters their email address into the form.
They then need to go to their inbox, open the email containing that link and click on it before they are added to your list. It might sound like extra work, but in reality, people who take these few steps are much more engaged than those who don’t.
Use a CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, which means you have to solve a puzzle to prove that your account is not owned by an automated system.
Fortunately, this step has been simplified with the introduction of reCAPTCHA, which is a free service that you can use to protect your website or app from automated bots. By asking humans to decipher the distorted text, it’s easy for them and difficult for robots– this helps distinguish between human visitors and robotic ones, so you know who has access to the site authentically. You’ll find CAPTCHAs in some forms, but thankfully, they’ve been simplified now with intelligent programming, which allows people to check off an “I’m not a robot” box because it would otherwise take too much time.
Implement Time-analysis
Spammers use automated bots to register on sites. To verify the identity of a registrant, you need to use time-analysis and found that they typically took at least 4 or 5 seconds before confirming their subscription.
Humans would take more time inputting all the required information, which was set in a way where subscribers needed to put their name, email address, and other additional data first before clicking the confirm button. In contrast, bots usually arent programmed to delay the process, therefore, filling it up immediately without any delay.
Add A Test Question To Your Form
If you’re using a form to sign up email subscribers, be sure to include at least one test question. For example: What is your favorite food? Do not use an easy answer like “chicken” or “pizza.” Give them options that have more than two answers and are difficult for bots to figure out.
Some of the most popular types of questions I use on forms are related to the products themselves, for example; Will you use this e-bike for work or leisure?
These test questions ensure that only real email subscribers and not bots will be signing up for your email list. But it can also be a handy way to collect additional information from the user that you can later use to market to them.
Adding Honey-pot
A honey pot is a simple and efficient way to block bots from infiltrating your website’s submission form. All the above processes are human accessible, but honey-pot is for bot access only.
Adding honey-pots means including submissions forms that can be filled by bots, not humans – real people will never see this form as they cannot fill it out themselves or with any help of technology (such as software).
Honey-pots help filter unwanted users and protect your forms while requiring no additional steps on the part of genuine users; if you don’t have some hidden data in there, then even someone who finds out about them won’t know what they’re looking at. You’ll find various codes available online, allowing you to get these up without any coding experience quickly.
Protect Your Forms
As a business, you want to make it as easy and streamlined as possible for your customers to sign up. But when bots try to spam your form with fake email addresses, things can get out of control in no time at all. That’s why we created this guide on how to prevent bots from spamming your signup forms so that you don’t have any problems. We hope that bot-spamming will not be an issue for you or anyone else who has signed up through your form with these tips in mind.
If any of the techniques here were new for you or sparked some thoughts on other ways to stop spammers, contact us! Our team can help with developing a strategy tailored specifically to your needs.
