I am not sure if this is the right forum to post this help request, but I have run out of options.

I am trying to capture the IP address of the user of a form on my site due to the huge amount of spam messages I am receiving. I want to put their IP on my deny IP list. This person is even taking the time to change the email address of the form sender each time they resubmit the form. They are constantly resubmitting this online form over and over again, about 100 times since yesterday afternoon.

I don't want to add a verify code or anything to discourage people from using my forms.

My ISP uses their own cgi script program and it's very limited.

I know how to do it with php, I just add the line of code:
<INPUT Name=IP type=hidden Value=<?php echo getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"); ?>>
but, this form must be html and the extension must be .htm For the life of me, I cannot find the required string to use in the form anywhere on the net.

The form I want to capture the IP is:
http://www.mississauga4sale.com/news...newsletter.htm

Any help would be appreciated. Maybe this is the wrong forum for this and if you know of a better forum to post this message to, I thank you in advance.

Is anyone else getting spammed from people re-submitting forms over and over again?

Thank you,
Mark

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Mississauga Real Estate

Find Homes for Sale in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

hmm... does your site run php? cause if it does you can probably save yourself a lot of maintenance headaches by templatizing your site. then for that page, you'd just have newsletter.php and you'd have access to all the php environment variables like REMOTE_ADDR. long story short, if your site allows you to run php, you could just call your newsletter.htm page --- newsletter.php and you should have access to those variables...

not sure if that helps... but hope it does...

Hello gtech,

I do have a couple of pages that I saved as .php to run a few simple scripts.

I really don't know much about php at all. I am so used to using html, completely self taught, so it would take much effort to relearn another language, php looks complicated.

Does php affect the way that web pages are indexed by google in any way shape or form?

I guess I could just save the pages I am having trouble with in php, I thought of that. But, I will lose all the google PR when I save them under a different name, is this true?

Is an identical page made in html and saved as .html and .php extension the exact same page and render the same and look the same?

Thanks for your help,
Mark

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Mississauga Real Estate

Find Homes for Sale in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

yes. a .php and a .html page should render exactly the same. i believe there might be a way to configure your site so that .html and .php pages are treated the same though. so that your .html pages can access the same variables that .php pages can. i'm not 100% sure about that though.

i'm not sure about losing the google PR on the pages. you probably will, but if you do all the SEO stuff correctly it should get back up there in no time i believe?

Thanks for your advice gtech, I will look into this and see if I can rectify the problems as you suggest.

Have a great day,
Mark

__________________
Mississauga Real Estate

Find Homes for Sale in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

If you add this to your .htaccess file in the www folder all of your html pages will be able to read and show php code... so in other words you could place php code on page.html and it would work just fine...


AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .htm .html

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Search Homes for Sale in SAN DIEGO and other San Diego Real Estate via the San Diego MLS.

It looks like this may not be a "person" as much as a "bot" set to attach forms they find on domains...
It has happened to me and several others where you get tons of emails from:

sdhsrth@ yourdomainname.com
dth5y645@ yourdomainname.com
and so on...

You need to have your form validate the email address server side before is gets submitted.. so it checks the email to see if it is real first....otherwise it doesnt send it... hope this helps...

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Search Homes for Sale in SAN DIEGO and other San Diego Real Estate via the San Diego MLS.

thanks for that bit of code sandiego!

mark, i just thought of another thing. there's also the CAPTCHA system that you could try implementing. basically it displays an image with text on it. robots and spiders will fail sending the form on through, but actual human users won't. it's a quite a pain, but probably worth looking into if you're getting spammed really bad.