Case Study: CiviCRM.org Forum reduces spam and fraudulent submissions with CiviCRM flood control

CiviCRM.org Forum blocks repeat searches within 5 seconds using CiviCRM

The CiviCRM.org Forum, a community support site, faced a challenge with automated spammers and bots attempting to flood its contribution form to test fraudulent credit cards. The vendor, CiviCRM, needed a solution that would protect the system without discouraging legitimate users, as a CAPTCHA would have done.

CiviCRM implemented a simple flood control mechanism for its CiviContribute form. The solution recorded a user's IP address and a timestamp in a cache table upon each successful form submission. If another submission from the same IP occurred within a 60-second interval, the system blocked it with an error message. This effectively prevented rapid, automated abuse while maintaining a seamless experience for human users, providing a lightweight and effective security layer.

CiviCRM.org Forum