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Permalink Browser Info Environment April 08, 2021 at 7:20 PM

Hello, your plugin is awesome!

I was wondering if the plugin allows the blocking of languages? I was not able to find this setting, so I assume it's not available. Much of the spam that still passes through is in Russian. If this is not available, would it be possible to add a feature that would block other languages sometime in an update? Or, maybe better yet, have the ability to block IP addresses from submitting forms in other countries like China, Russia, and the Philippines? Most of the websites we develop are local USA businesses and there is really no need for people in other countries to access our websites's forms or really the website.

Or, would it be possible to capture the senders IP address? I do not see the IP listed in the logs of the spam emails. Adding IP address to C5's blocked IP address section from spam senders may help block those senders. Thoughts?

A readily simple solution may be perhaps adding the Russian words used within the spam email to the Banned Word section of C5, but do you know if C5 recognizes the English translations of such? This would be problematic if I added a bunch of Russian words and the English translations were blocked.

Type:	Pre-Sale
Status:	Resolved

mnakalay replied on Apr 8, 2021 at 8:03 pm Permalink Reply

Hello,

Thank you for your kind words.

Concerning the Russian language: In the list of spammy keywords included with the package there are several hundred Russian expressions. I do not speak the language so I can't say more about it, but it will block some Russian.
It also will use concrete5 own bad words list so, as you suggested, you can add to it from the dashboard. Concrete5 doesn't do any translation so it will block only the exact characters you enter. TO be honest, in my experience, that stuff doesn't work really well but it does sometimes.

I was actually considering adding its own list of banned words to the package. Or I might make use of c5's list but filter it the way I do my own list, which is a more efficient way.

Lastly, in my experience, I found that 99% of spam will be flagged for reasons other than the words used. Either it was submitted too fast or the honey pot was filled. So with a bit of luck, you won't even need to flag the Russian language :)
Writing code to identify languages and block accordingly would be extremely difficult so that's probably not in the books.

If you're happy to block IP addresses from specific countries, you can easily do that from concrete5's dashboard. You can block a whole range of IP addresses so blocking a country is just a matter of banning the specific range for that country.

I considered adding the possibility to block spammers IPs. Not sure if I'll ever add it because given how spammers work your IP ban list will be pretty full pretty quick which might not be a great idea. But I'm thinking about it.

So in summary, since it's an option, I suggest you block Ip ranges of countries you don't want to allow. Or allow those you don't want to block. I think it's also a possibility. And then make sure to make good use of all the non-vocabulary-based spam blocking options, specifically the time to submission and the honey pot that, for me at least, block most spam attempts.

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