Someone puts in your form “William”, that’s great. But what about “Willliam”? That needs to fail validation. There’s been some cases here at Netbasic where people put “UUUUUU” or “AAAAAA” as their names, obviously fake names. It seems a simple enough task, but I did have a bit of trouble finding a good regexp to check for repetative characters. I’m not always the best with regular expressions, so this is what I found:
$result = preg_match('/([a-z])\1{3,}/', $value);
That works!
February 6th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
What’s the point? You’re just making your user jump through more hoops before providing you with invalid data. Do you think they’re going to say “hey, you’ve completely convinced me to give you my real information”, or are they going to change their name to “abcdef”?
IMO, you’re just leaving a bad taste in their mouth.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I see your point, but in these instances, most of the traffic we get, we have paid for – we need to do as much as we can to get the user to put in real information. If we find that the paid search for that keyword is yielding a lot of fake apps such as above, then we can change the keyword or something. It helps us to identify the best keywords to bid on and so on.