For some time I have had feedback pages on several of my websites based on the example given by David Powers in chapter 6 of "PHP for Dreamweaver 8". These worked fine for some years, but some months ago someone started stuffing pornographic advertisements into them.
A few weeks ago I got fed up with these messages, and devised a very simple filter to reject them (I won't explain how this works, because if I did the perpetrators could immediately change their technique to defeat it). If the content was acceptable I handled the message in the normal way, but otherwise I deleted the contents, and forwarded the message to a different address with the title "rubbish from XXX website". This worked well, but then I decided I didn't need to know anything about this stuff at all, so I modified the logic so that if the message is unacceptable it is simply dumped, but the sender is still shown the normal "Thank you for your feedback" message. This way the sender cannot tell whether or not his message has actually been sent, and so he cannot experiment to try to break the filter. Now if I try to send myself bad messages they simply disappear without trace, as expected, but I am still getting one or two messages a day sent with the version 1 (censored) logic. I have changed the messages in my new version, and verified that the old messages do not appear anywhere on my hard disk, and that there is only the new version of the feedback procedure on my server. The only explanation I can see is that someone has somehow managed to cache or mirror the version 1 logic, and is still dutifully stuffing pornography into it. As it is my understanding that the PHP code which handles the processing is inaccessible to the user, I cannot understand how this could have been done. Does anyone have any suggestions? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
