In theory - how could POST return form field NAMES, not data

General PHP Help
#1

So, I’ve got a multi-page form that’s been working great for months. On each page, I loop through the form scope and clean everything long before it goes to any output or the database.

[php]foreach($_POST as $key=>$value){
if ($key!=“submit”){
$value = trim($value);
$value = iconv(‘UTF-8’,‘ASCII//TRANSLIT’,$value);
$value = clean_data($value);
echo “\t<input type=“hidden” name=”$key" value="$value">\n";[/php]

For the most part - no problems here. There’s extra data type valdation right before data insert and stuff. This doesn’t seem to be my issue though.

This morning, I get a form result that instead of any data, shows the name of the field inputs AS the data. I can’t even figure out how this is possible!

So instead of:
First Name: Bob
Last Name: Smith

I’ve got:
First Name: f_name
Last Name: l_name

… which are the actual form text input NAMES.

Haven’t been able to replicate this regardless of what I do, so I’m pulling my hair out and rather concerned as well. That fact that it’s been working great for months makes me think it’s a temporary server issue (shared server).

In theory, other than a server issue, can anybody think of anything else that would give me this result? Even if a server issue, how?

Ideas?

#2

Spam/other crawler that fills in forms with field names as values?

#3

About the only thing I can come up with. I don’t see how a server glitch would cause this.

Couple of clues:

  1. anything that was a drop-down always had the FIRST value selected.

  2. date fields - they all use pickers to insure the formatting is correct, but all dates came in as “31 Dec 1969”. This is odd though, as in one section, you pick depart and return dates, and then a third for a date between the first two as a procedure date. (Site is for medical tourism). Despite validation on the site that will NOT let you select a depart date earlier than the current date, and a return date earlier than the depart date - all set to 31 Dec 1969.

  3. Form has a CAPTCHA at the end. It got submitted anyway. So, whatever got around the CAPTCHA.

Maybe not a bot but an actual human doing it for one reason or another?

#4

Id still bet a bot. Captchas can be beaten

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