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I have an idea for a website and I will be using a form to allow users to submit a text. The problem is that I don't want anyone to register(because I think that my idea is much more fun without registering as more people will use it) and by doing that I'm sure that people will spam the sh** out of my website.

My question is: What's the easiest way to prevent this from happening? It must be a really good way to block html code and any other pattern/tricks(spaces has to be filtered) spammers will use to submit links.. Of course I will use CAPTCHA to stop automated submission, my concern is about people manually submitting links.

Thanks in advance.

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2 Answers 2

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You could also moderate submissions or use a spam filtering service. There quite are a few services out there that have APIs:

http://akismet.com/

http://mollom.com

http://antispam.typepad.com

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these are plugins for WordPress, etc. I build my own website. –  Loolooii Feb 11 '11 at 0:29
    
Correct, those services have plugins for WordPress, but they also have a direct API that you can use in your custom site. Mollom even has a PHP library premade for you to use. –  Josh Feb 11 '11 at 22:02
up vote 1 down vote

strip_tags should work for most cases. I personally favor using a more comprehensive library to handle user-submitted text. htmLawed is excellent for this purpose.

http://www.bioinformatics.org/phplabware/internal_utilities/htmLawed/index.php

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It looks really complex. Isn't there something easier to work with? –  Loolooii Feb 11 '11 at 0:31
    
strip_tags is easy. htmLawed does take a little setting up, but once you have your options in place, it's easy too. Bottom line is that strip_tags is a solution you can use right away, look in to a library if it doesn't do what you need it to. –  Chris Feb 11 '11 at 0:47

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