Site Settings

Phosis gives you access to manage some basic settings for your site. There are a host of other features around site & system management that will be coming in future updates!^v1.0

Site Default Hero Images¶

You can select or upload a file to be the default image for your site when a page doesn’t have a hero image and you’re using the data-phosis-object="PageImage" attribute in your site’s <head>.

Use JPGs for this

You should always use JPG images for this feature to enable automatic resizing, cropping, and compression options.

Site Domains & DNS¶

Phosis’s IP address is 75.2.109.5. You should point any domains/subdomains to this IP address for your Phosis site. This is our primary load balancer that sits in front of all Phosis Render nodes.

Phosis supports multiple domains for a single site, with one being the canonical domain that all others redirect to.

When you add a new domain to a Phosis site, Phosis attempts to validate it:

First, domain resolution is checked to make sure that it’s a valid domain/subdomain in the domain’s DNS server.
Next, Phosis confirms whether or not the domain/subdomain is actually mapped to Phosis’s IP address listed above.
After confirming mapping, Phosis checks to see if a valid SSL certificate is installed for your site.
Finally, if all the above pass, you can choose to make your site HTTPS-only, which we recommend for all sites.

There is no limit to how many domains you can have installed for your site.

A note about SSLs…

Configuring an SSL certificate is presently an administrative task. In the future, we hope to enable you to easily install your own certificates.^v1.0

Keyword-rich domain redirects for SEO

Mattermind recommends you do not do register and use quantities of domains rich in your target keywords in an attempt to help with SEO.

Moz has an article outlining the reasons with much more detail than we’ll get into here.

If you look at the date of the article, this was already being discouraged 10 years ago. Google and other search engines had already caught onto and cared for this SEO technique at that point. In the intervening years, they have begun actively punishing domains that go too far with this.

What is “too far”? There’s no hard-and-fast rule. Just know that Google and other search engines actively discourage this process.

If you are adding multiple domains for the sake of customer ease, that’s fine. And, as the Moz article states, if you’re building mini-sites for each of your keyword-rich domains that are clearly from your company, that is also acceptable — in other words, for mini-sites, you’re actually adding value to these additional domains and to the users’ experience.

But otherwise, there is at best a very minor SEO benefit to multiple keyword-rich domains redirecting to your primary domain, and at worst at some point in the future, you may get your site blacklisted. Tread with caution!

Robots.txt¶

You can configure your site’s robots.txt (used by search engines and other automated systems) via this textbox. As shortcuts, you can click Allow All or Deny All to quickly tell search engines they are permitted or denied, or customize your robots.txt to your specific needs. Then, click Save Site anywhere on this page.

By default, all new sites are now set to deny all search engines. This is to permit staging and development without leaking to search engines. PhosisUI will inform you if your site is set up to disallow all search engine traffic.

Form Bot/Spam Detection¶

Use this section to configure the particulars of the Little Bot Peep™ algorithm used for spam detection on your site, as mentioned in the Bot/Spam Detection section of Forms in the Developer Guide.

The settings are divided into behavior and content analysis options. Either half of LBP2’s functionality can flag a submission as spam independently:

Behavior Options¶

Little Bot Peep’s behavior analysis uses some basic checks (e.g. the referring site of the form submission, was the nonce tampered with, time-based behavior, etc.) to immediately identify automated submissions.

For time-based behavior, anything faster than a total amount of time calculated for each form on your site will be flagged as spam. These default values were chosen to be conservative and safe based on tens of thousands of form submissions across multiple Mattermind sites both within and outside of Phosis.

But, your exact site’s requirements may differ, so you can always modify LBP2’s behavior with the following options:

Base time¶

The minimum amount of time, in seconds, that you should allow for users to complete your site’s forms. This allows for the time it takes a user to load your page, any reading & scrolling they may do, and beginning to navigate to the form itself.

Default: 6 seconds

Paragraph time¶

The amount of time allotted for each <textarea> that may appear on your site’s forms. Think of how long you expect the text your visitors to write will be, and then you can adjust accordingly.

Default: 2 seconds

Field time¶

The amount of time, in seconds, that each form field may take to complete on average.

Default: 1.2 seconds

Content Analysis Options¶

These options configure Little Bot Peep’s evaluation of the content of form submissions, used to determine a potential spam score. Specific keywords, phrases, and symbols are checked, as well as running any text through textual analysis and a an analysis of the length of the text vs. time to type it. These are all factored together to arrive at a bot score from 0-100.

Any submission with a bot score higher than your Spam Analysis Threshold will be classified as spam, regardless of the results of the behavior analysis.

Spam Threshold¶

The limit of what Phosis should consider an acceptable content analysis result before flagging a form submission as spam. Valid ranges are 1-100. We recommend not going below 40, as fast typists can trigger this

Default: 75

Keywords¶

There are four customizable lists of keywords and symbols that range from penalties of 25 points per instance to 100 points (instant disqualification). You can customize these lists if you wish or keep the defaults.

If your site is domain-specific in some way, you may find that keywords that would trigger a penalty on a general site may be relevant to your contact forms. For instance, a site targeting the healthcare industry may not want to assess penalty points for the word “prescription” in contact requests.

Symbols¶

Often, spammers will replace letters with nonstandard symbols or Unicode lookalike characters in an attempt to circumvent keyword detection. For English language and similar sites, overuse of symbols or replacement characters is an immediate red flag, and Little Bot Peep detects this behavior.

Phrases & Speed¶

LBP2 already analyzes the speed of overall form completion as a part of behavior analysis. However, this speed can also impact the bot score. Anything above 216 wpm is automatically rejected as spam, as this exceeds the world record! But there is also a multiplier assessed on a sliding scale based on our research into average typing speeds. Anything too fast will begin multiplying the bot score derived from keywords & symbols.

Content Analysis - In Training¶

Finally, LBP2 is continually being trained with a new corpus of spam & ham (good) messages to spot new trends in automated or marketing messages. At some point in the future, we’ll be turning this feature of LBP2 on. When that happens, the actual content of form submissions will be analyzed and the results added to the Spam Analysis Score.

Examples¶

For example, let’s say you receive a form submission that includes the following parameters:

The following words/phrases and their penalty values:
- $50 - inclusion of a dollar sign: +10 points
- increase your web site visitors - three keywords: +30 points
- Content analysis - an additional +25 points
WPM analysis results in a 1.35x multiplier

Resulting in: 65 x 1.35, or 91 – clearly a marketing submission. This submission would be flagged as spam based on Phosis’s default threshold.

However, what if the user was merely telling you their budget for a service you provide? And, they were an incredibly fast typist, almost unbelievably so?

The following words/phrases and their penalty values:
- $1500 - inclusion of a dollar sign: +10 points
- Content analysis - an additional +15 points
WPM analysis results in a 1.95x multiplier

Resulting in: 25 x 1.95, or 48.75, well below Phosis’s default threshold.

You can see how several factors working together will catch current messages that are managing to get through, and, once we enable content analysis spam will be caught that much more effectively.