IP Address Capture w/ Forms - Reduce bad leads or ?

[bvadel]

I've seen a lot of postings about folks receiving bogus leads via their website, either from bots, spammers, competitors or tire-kickers filling in totally irrelevant information. While you can't obviously weed out all of this, I was wondering if the following approach might decrease some of it....

What are your thoughts on including a statement with any forms that need to be entered which states that:

"To verify the source of form-based submissions from this site, the Internet Protocol (IP) address through which users are accessing the site and the time of sending is included in the form data. The IP address data is recorded to trace misuse or abuse of these forms and will only be used in these circumstances."

The idea isn't to try and play big brother or discourage folks from submitting valid information but simply to minimize or deter at least some of the abuse that occurs.

Thoughts?

[pcdoc]

It will work only if the (ro)bot or spammer software can read.

Otherwise, it's kind of lame.

My understanding (having worked with / for an ISP) is that it takes a court order or an official request from a law-enforcement agency to track the IP address to an end-point (you, the tire-kicker).

Of course, that was pre-9/11 and the Patriot Act, but that's a totally different topic for discussion.

[bvadel]

The goal really isn't to try and prosecute folks but to try and provide a small deterrent which might make some phony buyers/sellers or competitive agents think twice before they complete and submit phony information.

[ERE Breckenridge]

Most phony leads are submitted using automated scripts, the best and most likely the only way to stop scripts from auto submitting to your forms is to use and image security code verification system.

You can download a free one here:

http://www.cocoavillagepublishing.co...s/php/scripts/

You must have php and GD support. I'm sure there are some cgi/asp based scripts if you don't have php support but I have no idea where you can find one.

[bvadel]

Thanks for the info. I've got 20/20 vision and had a hard time reading/interpreting some of the image security stuff on their demo so i'm sure OCR couldn't do much with it either.