My website's registration page was getting hammered by spambots to the tune of 1 fake registration attempts a day (hammered relative to my overall traffic! ha).
As registration fires off confirmation emails, I wanted to lock this down if possible.
I went ahead and implemented the hidden form input screen (address, phone, etc) and now my site automatically redirects to spambot.php if the "sensors" are tripped.
This has been working great...
but I'm curious about the after effects. I've got my Google Analytics javascript nugget in the spambot.php page, but it has only registered 1 pageview in the past month. Meanwhile, my host's AWStats logs indicate 19 pageviews -- which would seem about right considering past history.
Which makes me wonder - do spambots generally ignore javascript?
As this is an extremely difficult question to answer, I will just give my own, subjective opinion:
No, most of them probably don't.
I cannot prove that this is true - but another, similar question that I often see is whether Googlebot ignores JavaScript or not - and it could seem that it doesn't.
Google (maybe) discards most JavaScript due to performance reasons - and as Googlebot and a spambot performs the same task - crawls the web - I don't think that most spambots would run JavaScript.