mysociety
Add spam prevention to contact form
This is a long-standing problem (neither introduced nor, alas, solved by #467 changes) - a lot of messages that come via the contact form are spam.
I have vague memories of a previous discussion about showing a captcha to non-UK IP addresses, did we do that on another of our websites and find it cut out a good proportion of the junk submissions? Could we give that a try here too? Or other possible solutions?
@MyfanwyNixon if you had to do a ballpark estimate, how long does it take you to deal with the spam that comes in, in an average week?
Every day I 'select all' and then uncheck anything that might conceivably not be spam. That only takes a minute, obvs. However I then open ambiguous messages - perhaps 2 or 3 - to check if they are valid (they are usually not). Five days a week, call it 10 minutes in total.
BUT there is the additional detail of having to look at inappropriate phrases which is never pleasant first thing in the morning!
Useful to know the cost of it, when it eventually comes to allocating developer time to adding a fix.
In the meantime, I wonder whether more Gmail filters on some of the most common phrases could help cut it down a bit?
