What are some best practices for implementing spam protection in a PHP application using MySQL queries?

Spam protection in a PHP application using MySQL queries involves implementing checks to prevent spam submissions, such as checking for duplicate entries or filtering out suspicious content. One common approach is to create a blacklist of known spam keywords or patterns and compare incoming data against this list before allowing it to be stored in the database.

// Check for duplicate entries before inserting into the database
$check_duplicate_query = "SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM table_name WHERE column_name = :value";
$stmt = $pdo->prepare($check_duplicate_query);
$stmt->bindParam(':value', $input_value);
$stmt->execute();
$row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

if ($row['count'] > 0) {
    // Handle duplicate entry error
    echo "Duplicate entry detected.";
} else {
    // Insert data into the database
    $insert_query = "INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES (:value)";
    $stmt = $pdo->prepare($insert_query);
    $stmt->bindParam(':value', $input_value);
    $stmt->execute();
    echo "Data inserted successfully.";
}