Black Sheep SystemsAddress checks
How much has arrived lately from this address, its address block, the email given, and the site as a whole. A burst from one place is noticed before it becomes a flood.
LADON · VERSION 0.1 · COMING SOON
Form protection that never leaves your server.
Ladon keeps spam and bots off your website's forms — contact pages, sign-ups, feedback — and runs entirely on your own PHP hosting. No outside service sees your visitors, and nobody is asked to pick out traffic lights.
Most form protection works by sending every visitor to someone else's service and trusting what comes back. That is convenient, and it means a third party sees who visits your site, when, and from where. Ladon does the same job on the hosting you already pay for.
It is a folder you upload, a setup page you open once, and a few lines in the form and the script that receives it. Nothing to sign up for, no API key, no monthly bill.
It already guards this site: the NewsDesk Studio feedback form runs on Ladon.
How it decides
Four checks, cheapest first.
Every submission passes through them in order, so the obvious junk is turned away before anything costly is done with it.
A signed puzzle
The visitor's browser quietly solves a fresh puzzle that Ladon signed. Each one works once and expires, and an address that looks risky gets a harder one. Built on the open-source ALTCHA widget.
Form checks
The form was not sent within seconds of loading, and a hidden field that people never see was left empty. Bots that fill in everything give themselves away.
Content score
Links, repetition, keyboard mash and known spam phrases add points. Low scores are accepted, middling ones are kept for review, and high ones are refused with a message telling a real person how else to reach you.
Worth knowing
It tightens on its own
If submissions surge, Ladon raises every check for an hour and then relaxes again without anyone touching it. Whoever you name is told it happened.
It keeps very little
Counters and a daily log of outcomes, scores and reasons. Addresses and emails are only ever stored as keyed hashes, and the words people write are never stored by Ladon at all. The log is deleted after 30 days by default.
A refusal is not a dead end
A real person who trips the checks is told plainly how else to reach you, rather than being left looking at an error.
It fits your page
The widget takes its colours from your own stylesheet, so it looks like part of the form rather than something bolted on.
Where it stands
Version 0.1 — not yet released
Ladon is working and in use on this site, but it is not available to download yet. When it is, it will be free and open source under the Apache License 2.0.
NEEDS
Ordinary PHP hosting: PHP 8.1 or newer with cURL. GD only if your form takes pictures.
This page describes what Ladon does today. If you want it on your own site before it is published, get in touch.