Preventing spammers from becoming part of your house file?

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scox
scox ✭
Ancient Membership First Reply
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions

This week I noticed that I had an unusal increase in the number of new contacts in my house file. It turns out a number of them appear to be spam generated email addresses. Are their any authentication components I can add to my registration/tell a friend pages to prevent this type of registration?

Has anyone else had this problem?

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  • Steve Hurtado
    Steve Hurtado ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1

    Hello,

    What is happening here is that programs called "bots" are going through the internet looking for pages with a web form. The bots then fill out the form which in the case of Convio clients creates constituents. Being that most clients have many such forms (registration pages, surveys, etc), there are several pages which this can be happening on. This is not actively harmful other then creating an excessive amount of erroneous constituents in the constituent360. We are currently working on a way to deter such programs from submitting these forms.

    For now, just remove constituents that are obviously erroneous when they are found.

    Regards,

    Steve

  • davidb
    davidb ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply

    what do these spam generated email addresses look like scox? anything identifiable about them?

    -db

  • scox
    scox ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply
    davidb :

    what do these spam generated email addresses look like scox? anything identifiable about them?

    -db

    The records typically had the same strange first/last name and an email address that ended in a .cn

  • Walter Winfield
    Walter Winfield ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1

    I found a lot of these addresses in our file a few months ago. I discovered them by reviewing the bounce-backs whenever we send our enewsletter. Now I periodically search the file and remove them. In Constituent360 I search the email field using phrases like "%casino", "%viagra", "%slots", etc. You could probably set up a query to do the same. Convio could probably implement a form of Captcha authentication but even that isn't perfect and it will inhibit some folks from registering because they don't want to take the extra 10 seconds to fill in the Captcha data. In short, there's no simple solution to this problem.

    Best,

    Walter Winfield

    Director of Information Systems

    Autism Society of America

  • Walter Winfield
    Walter Winfield ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1

    Here's something even more evil. Earlier this week someone reported "objectionable content" on one of our Tributes pages. When I investigated I discovered that bots had been populating the guest book with the kind of content usually found in spam (no need to elaborate here, we all know what I mean). There were hundreds of entries. I spent a few hours removing them and then notified the Tribute owner (Champion) with an apology.

    My advice to my colleagues is that you might want to review guest books periodically, just in case.

    My request for the folks at Convio is to make it easier to remove multiple guest book entries. The process now requires removing them one at a time and then confirming the removal. Something like a tick box with a submit button (like some of the Web mail programs have) would be helpful.

    Regards,

    Walter Winfield

    Director of Information Systems

    Autism Society of America

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