README.md

No Captcha Form Spam Filter

No Captcha Form Spam Filter is a PHP utility library for dealing with spam bots using unobtrusive and user friendly techniques.

Applying this techniques will help to reduce the span in your sites in more than 90% and users will not be annoyed with intrusive Captchas or extra fields.

Installation

You can download it and place it on your third party libraries folder but we highly recommend that you install it through composer.

Either run

$ composer require daxslab/no-captcha

or add

"daxslab/no-captcha": "~1.0"

to the require section of your composer.json file.

The NoCaptchaAntiSpam Class

The NoCaptchaAntiSpam Class can be used to declare Protection Rules, Include security code in forms and check if the form submission does not trigger any rule validation.

For creating an instance of the NoCaptchaAntiSpam Class, the create() static function can be used:

use daxslab\nocaptcha\NoCaptchaAntiSpam;
use daxslab\nocaptcha\rules\CssHiddenFieldRule;

// Declare no captcha anti spam object with CSS based hidden field check
$noCaptchaAntiSpam = NoCaptchaAntiSpam::create([
        'rules' => [
            CssHiddenFieldRule::create([
                // form input field name
                'name' => 'css_hidden_field',
            ])
        ],
]);

Including form elements

Using the NoCaptchaAntiSpam created instance you can include the needed elements inside a form with the renderRules() function:

<form id="contactForm" method="post">
    <div class="form-group">
        <label for="contactName">Name</label>
        <input class="form-control" name="contact_name" id="contactName" placeholder="Enter name">
    </div>
    
    <!--  Include rules form elements  -->
    <?= $noCaptchaAntiSpam->renderRules() ?>
    
    <button type="submit" name="submit_button" class="btn btn-primary">Submit</button>
</form>    

Verifying form submission

Using the checkSubmit() function from the NoCaptchaAntiSpam created instance you can check if any of the declared Rules triggers when the form is submitted:

if ($_POST){
    if ($noCaptchaAntiSpam->checkSubmit()){
        echo 'Form submitted correctly';
    } else {
        echo 'Bot detected';
    }
}

Rules

Rule classes implements different security checks including:

• CssHiddenFieldRule: A honeypot field hidden using CSS
• JavascriptGeneratedHiddenFieldRule: A honeypot field generated using JavaScript
• JavascriptFilledInputRule: A JavaScript filled hidden input
• SessionTimeTrapRule: A time trap using session stored variables
• FormTimeTrapRule: A time trap using a form field
• CookieCheckRule: A cookie verification

A NoCaptchaAntiSpam instance can contain one or multiple rules.

Random field names

Random field names can be applied for an extra security layer, they are stored in PHP sessions and rules field names will change making difficult to bots identify them. Random field names can be applied to single rules or multiple rules.

Documentation

For extended documentation and examples you can put the doc folder behind a PHP capable web server.