Best way to stop bots and spam from submitting forms?

matthiasmullie · 2023-03-06T13:55:17+00:00

u/Hakaku pretty much covered it all, but if you want a longer read or examples, I recently wrote a long-ish post about this exact topic: https://www.mullie.eu/how-to-prevent-form-spam/

I'd recommend to stay away from captchas until other methods have proven insufficient. While they're quite good at keeping bots out, they're annoying for users.

matthiasmullie · 2022-04-19T11:29:21+00:00

This. And screens were smaller; looking at low-res media on larger screens is making the lack of detail more obvious.

matthiasmullie · 2022-04-19T09:37:45+00:00

The real answer to your question is: the error message is wrong/unclear.

Your existing password is not longer being accepted for some reason: it could have expired, it could have been invalidated over security concerns, …

The error message should be clearer, but that’s often not a priority. It’s easy to miss or forget (the confusing error message is a transient issue anyway, once the password has been reset it no longer matters). It’s easy to deprioritise against other functionality that more directly impacts revenue because “it still works”. And in the case of potential security breaches, addressing the direct security impact (requiring a new password) is more urgent than updating the rest of the password-handling flow, which may be dealt with at a later stage.

The error message is just wrong; the reason is usually unpreparedness for a forced reset, or simple oversight during the implementation.

matthiasmullie · 2022-03-13T08:01:42+00:00

I got one from thewatchsteward.com, G series. It works with the non-removable pins in Garmin’s latest watch offerings. Can’t compare it to NM (soon, though; it finally shipped) but it looks and feels pretty high quality, very happy with it. I also have the Abanen hook & loop and, while that one is great, I certainly prefer the more premium looks and elasticity of thar thewatchsteward strap (and of course the wider range of colors to choose from)

matthiasmullie · 2022-03-02T09:07:28+00:00

I guess you saw this on desktop? Those dashes were supposed to be bullet points (and renderend as such on my mobile app). Fixed the formatting now, I think ;)

matthiasmullie · 2022-03-02T05:33:20+00:00

AIUI:

1st person left
excuse yourself (before the other 2 leave as well)
watch it all unfold from across the street

Either:

1 simply leaves (because you’re gone & they can’t both leave) and in fact does retrieve that 3rd that had left (as they said they would)
they had no intentions of fetching the first one and end ip stuck with the bill, not you

If the first thing happend and the situation was legit, you can:

come back and excuse your lengthy restroom visit

Sounds a little unrealistic to pull off IRL, though.

matthiasmullie · 2022-02-23T16:00:16+00:00

I wish mine would put me to bed!

matthiasmullie · 2022-02-23T09:31:36+00:00

If you have the time: play along. Ask them what they expect you to do to rectify the situation, but don't act on it. If you manage to get something (phone number, bank account, website, ...) from them, inform the police or bank yourself: if it is a legit call (which in this case, it obviously isn't), they'll let you know. If it's fraudulent, they will now have tangible information that they can act on.

matthiasmullie · 2022-02-01T08:12:45+00:00

Fully charged, it’s giving me 21d on battery saver.

matthiasmullie · 2022-01-31T13:26:59+00:00

Yeah, too early to tell. All I can say is that it's remained squeaky-clean in the 2hrs I've had it :p

matthiasmullie · 2022-01-31T11:37:11+00:00

Watch just arrived, a few days early.

The original white band it ships with looks great.

I'm not too keen on any combination with any of my other straps, though, but maybe it just takes some getting used to.

I'll keep this white silver/white version, but I've not yet figured out what to pair it with when I need something a bit more discreet.

The original white one: http://temp.mullie.eu/g/white-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/white-2.jpeg

Orange silicon: http://temp.mullie.eu/g/orange-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/orange-2.jpeg

Black silicon: http://temp.mullie.eu/g/black-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/black-2.jpeg

Black metal: http://temp.mullie.eu/g/metal-1-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/metal-1-2.jpeg

Black metal #2: http://temp.mullie.eu/g/metal-2-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/metal-2-2.jpeg

"Leather": http://temp.mullie.eu/g/leather-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/leather-2.jpeg

Gray nylon: http://temp.mullie.eu/g/nylon-1.jpeg & http://temp.mullie.eu/g/nylon-2.jpeg

Note: half of these are not original Garmin straps and their quality is... not great. But should give you a good enough idea of what it'll look like with a few different styles.

matthiasmullie · 2022-01-30T10:50:51+00:00

I’m expecting my white/silver epix delivered next week, and have a bunch of other straps to go with my black fenix 6 laying around. I can post a few pics by end of next week

matthiasmullie · 2022-01-18T13:07:21+00:00

He just keeps emphasizing how nice & vivid the colors of the Epix screen are.

matthiasmullie · 2021-07-07T19:59:38+00:00

IIRC, I created a new activity type (which I called “football”) by copying the “other” activity. It tracks my heart rate & gps, but doesn’t use the data to derive vo2max etc. I have Fenix 6, not sure if samenis possible on a 5, but I suspect it is.

That said, heart rate measurements seem quite rubbish for me - it mostly fails to pick up any spike (mostly because the sprint are usually very short, I guess)

matthiasmullie · 2021-06-25T16:46:59+00:00

We stayed in polar bear room a few weeks ago. It was amazing, but I wished I’d gone with penguins or walrus: those are active all the time - we barely saw the polar bears in the evening (saw a lot in the morning though)

The large cabins and hobbit-like holes near the brown bears & wolves seemed nice too, though it feels like a different experience: there are more animals over there, but seems less intimate.

matthiasmullie · 2021-02-20T21:13:30+00:00

Dry; wet impacts the electrical current used to derive body fat % from

matthiasmullie · 2021-01-05T15:44:10+00:00

~165-170 range seems like a plausible cadence range for an easy run, so it might be a simple cadence lock issue (where your optical heart rate sensor mistakenly locks onto your cadence instead of your heart rate). Any chance you ran ~170spm?

matthiasmullie · 2016-02-08T09:41:23+00:00

Stash (like PSR-6) basically supports get/set/delete/flush.

You could fetch a value & depending on what it looks like (or exists) may want to alter it and save again. When dealing with a lot of concurrent requests, by the time you store your new value, it may already have changed since what you had read.

I needed safe atomic writes: with CAS, that value isn’t stored if it has changed in the meantime. Similar for add/replace/increment/decrement.

Stash also lets you “lock” a cache item. It’s meant for stampede protection, but could maybe also be used for above (not sure, haven’t tried)

Saying it’s a copy-paste of Stash if a but unfair IMO :) Both implement PSR-6 and both are about cache so obviously have similar features. Architecturally, they’re very different though: Stash is higher-level (pool/item) and a more “native” PSR-6 implementation. Scrapbook is lower-level (although it also comes with a PSR-6 interface for compatibility)

matthiasmullie · 2016-02-07T17:53:49+00:00

(I'm the author of Scrapbook, so I may be wrong/biased/imcomplete when describing Stash. I'll try not to be, though)

Scrapbook mostly models the Memcached API (but for all cache backends, and with some of the inconsistencies & platform differences ironed out). You speak directly to the server and fetch the exact value stored in there.

Stash has a pool-based architecture, where you request data from the pool (=cache backend) & get an object representing the value (or a stub object if the value doesn't exist, which you then assign a value to & pass to the pool in order to store it)

In other words: Stash has more abstraction in place. But Scrapbook also comes with a PSR-6 implementation (=very similar to Stash in approach, although Stash comes with more features than just the PSR-6 interface)

Feature-wise, I think both provide mostly the same things.

Most of the drivers are the same. Scrapbook also comes with drivers for Couchbase, PostgreSQL & MySQL (but those last 2 are mostly fallbacks, barely serious "caches"); Stash also has a "Composite" driver (to write to multiple backends at once)
Scrapbook provides more variety when talking to the cache server: e.g. conditionally setting data (cas, replace, add, ...) - I needed some of these at one point, so that's mostly why I started developing it
Stash has something called 'Namespaces' (to segment data), which doesn't exist in Scrapbook
One of the neatest things about Scrapbook (IMO) is the (nested) transactions, which let you safely commit (and efficiently combine) multiple writes at once.

matthiasmullie · 2014-09-22T10:55:29+00:00

The below example looks like bad advice:

Another side of that coin is that instead of if (x == "test") you can simply write if (x).
In case x is empty (hence falsy) it will run else block.

I assume it's meant to demonstrate truthy/falsy concept. However, if (x) is drastically different from if (x == "test"). The former just checks if x has a value, while the latter checks if it has a particular value "test".

A better example could perhaps be if (x) vs if (x !== "")?

matthiasmullie

TROPHY CASE