With version 1.0.7 Joomla introduced spam word-filters. What is spam anyhow? Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
Robots can target not only mailing lists but also are able to use contact forms to submit the message. The Joomla Contact us form is vulnerable for this kind of spam and “core” introduced a very good way to protect emails from reaching our mailbox through the contact form. You are now able to set word-filtering in Joomla and you do that through three fields in your menu contact link……Here is how:
Administrator > Menu > Main menu (or whatever name you have given that menu) > contact_us or whatever you have given the name of the menu-link…
This can be to the Component_contact or to a Contact_link. We show in the screen-shot the menu-link to the Contact_link but you will find the same three fields also in the menu-option Component_Contact. The way of doing things is equal!
The pictures shows your menu-link and in the right-bottom part you see three fields. By moving your mouse over the description a small explanation is given. Here you can enter the word values you want to be blocked at all times .
eg: porn;risk;credit;mortgage;loan;viagra; etc
Joomla will stop most of the times these kinds of words reaching your inbox through the contact form……..
To even make the hurdle higher for “spammers” use a feature called CAPTCHA. Find all about it here A very good Joomla-application supporting Captcha is SecurityImages What does it do?
Security images are dynamically generated images containing hard to read text, it is using a combination of font colors, font size, fuzzy background, font angle in order to disallow computer to automate reading (and so limit spamming). The user (a human) has to reproduce all character correctly before being allowed to post.
In combination with the standard Joomla 1.0.7 feature you should be fairly protected if you install SecurityImage. Download here from Forge
