In this week's issue of New in REC+, we highlight the extra anti-spam layers we have introduced for combating spam bots leaving comments on forms, which has been spreading to registration, login & search forms. We have also made other improvements including adding Stripe for form payments and improving the login and re-ordering processes.
Anti-spam actions
To recap, we previously introducing Akismet's filtering system on all sites and extended our own internal blocking techniques to stop spam comments being left. We have now gone a step further by introducing the StopForumSpam.com service to identify and block known bad actors from submitting spam.
- StopForumSpam integration
Forms & user registrations now use the StopForumSpam.com service to help protect against known bad email & IP addresses of spammers by blocking their submissions. NB This is currently in trial and currently set to disabled by default. Once the trial has completed it will be enabled by default on all sites
This is accessed in Admin > Connect > Utilities > StopForumSpam > Enable StopForumSpam on registrations - Rate limiting improvements
The login, register, forgot password & search programs have been redesigned so our our rate limit system more extensively block bots after a number of attempts within certain timeframes. - Preventing spam from being part of your mailing lists
Our subscriber system will now block known email TLD's (top level domains) with a high probability of being fake from polluting your subscriber lists, for example submissions from .ru domains.
Payments
- Stripe payments on forms
You can now take Stripe payments via forms built in Form Builder. This adds to the existing PayPal Express method that is already available.
Set this up in: Admin > Connect > Payment Processors > Stripe
(add public & secret key from Stripe here, found in your stripe account > developer > api keys)
In Form Builder > Edit Form > Form payment method & Form payment mode.
For GDPR - Enable the Stripe Cookies & *.stripe.com domain in Cookie Manager
Process Improvements
- Customer reorder confirmation
When a user is repeat ordering via their user account, they will now be warned if they try to exit before completing the re-ordering process, which stops them losing their cart unintentionally. - Login refactoring
We've spent a good amount of time recently reworking the login process behind the scenes to be simpler, more consistent & give better warnings back to users if there is an issue with their login attempt. It also now handles further edge cases where users switch cart sessions between mobile & desktop during the ordering process.
