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How to create a new page on form submit?

I'm attempting to create a new page every time a form is submitted. It'll be an order status page- one that'll be updated periodically. Basically, I want the user to see a form confirmation page, and I want it to be permanent link (that they can visit later).
My first thought was using variables in the URL, like so:
http://www.example.org/member.php?id=123
And then calling the id using GET
echo $_GET['id'];
http://www.example.org/member.php would be a template, just waiting for the few details which are specific to the user.
Once I have this in place, I could use a simple if statement to check their order status.
For example,
if ($id === "user_id") {
echo "Your order is: Pending";
}
However, this seems like a bad idea, just for the security aspect of it. If someone else guesses a user ID, they can view their order status. Going off of that, here's my first question.
If the user ID is long enough, is this a secure practice?
Otherwise, what are some other methods of doing this? Creating a new page every time the form is submitted feels like a bad practice- people could spam it, and there's a possibility that someone could exploit this to create malicious pages on the site.
Any suggestions? Most major retail sites have order confirmation pages (think ebay.com)- how do they do it? Also, is my suggested URL format secure?

The most ideal scenario is you force users to login prior to submitting the form then provide them with a list of their past orders of which they can check the status providing the user_id of the order matches the id from the session of the logged in user. Give each order in the list a link like yoursite.com/orders/1 then query for an order with an id of one with a user_id matching the logged in users id to ensure they're the only ones that can view it.
If you don't want to have to do any of that and just provide a permanent link to the status page I'd save a long randomly generated string against the order and provide it to the user to check in the future, e.g
yoursite.com/orders/wUk1DhfxMh if you're using a framework with some routing
or yoursite.com/orders.php?code=wUk1DhfxMh if you're not.
Query the database to select the order with the matching code, ensure you prevent MySQL injection and sanitize the $_GET input.

Are you sure you need to make a new page?
You could just have a basic "confirm" page (ex. http://yoursite.com/order/confirm) which uses PHP sessions to create a customized confirm page–
Other than that, IF you make a new page, you should use ID's in the URL and ALSO check the session id. (ex. http://yoursite.com/order/confirm/ABsisnEALnsoSK?yyyy=xxxx) and then ALSO check if the user is logged in.
Lastly, cymath has a good example of async page-creation; although it isn't exactly what you are looking for.
EDIT: It is not page creation, it's like what I said before: one page with extra parameters in the url: a permanent link, just using PHP.

I understood that you are having some doubts about how to make the algorithm of your app, here's what i thought to this case:
Insert the order at your database, get the id of the insertion and give it to the user.
Set the page where the user will check the status to receive a $_GET['id'], check (SELECT) if this id exists in the database.
(if the user exists): get the information you need from the table
you store them. (FETCH_ASSOC or FETCH_OBJECT)
(if the user don't exist):show an error.
If you are experiencing some doubts about how to code CodeSchool is offering free trial on all courses this weekend.
If the user ID is long enough, is this a secure practice?
R: To improve the security of the transactions, try to understand/learn about PDO Class, i think it will get your code to next level if you aggregate some Good Practices and Design Patterns.
For more information, visit PHP's Documentation.

Simple HTML form into SQL DB using PHP, getting hammered by bots

I have a very simple HTML form which is for pre-registering for my car show. Unfortunately it has attracted the attention of spammers because there's an "address" field which they use to inject their spam URLs into.
I've added javascript form validation which says if the address field contains any slashes (like "http://") then it pops up a box telling spammers to go away.
I've added htaccess that I thought was supposed to stop users from being able to hit the PHP file which is used to submit the form into the DB without coming from my domain first.
I had recaptcha, but they were able to get around that as well so I removed it since it wasn't effective.
I know one flaw is that I can browse directly to my PHP file and it will insert a blank row into the database - how can I prevent this as well?
Does anyone have a good site or steps to take to stop these bots from hitting my form?

ReCaptcha, if well configured, should have solved your problem. There's no easy way to "go around that".
I've added htaccess that I thought was supposed to stop users from
being able to hit the PHP file which is used to submit the form into
the DB without coming from my domain first.
That's probably your problem. The bots are problem just calling the registration page with the right parameters. One way to get around it would be to display a hidden input field on your form, populate it with some random value, and check that you get the same value when the form is submitted.
But again ReCaptcha should work... if it doesn't you should ask a specific question about that.

first of all, validate the data that are send from the Form, check them if are valid, not empty. etc. If you are using a framework those have validation classes(use it), else create some,
second put back the captcha and don't send any data to the server if this isn't valid

Preventing bot form submission

I'm trying to figure out a good way to prevent bots from submitting my form, while keeping the process simple. I've read several great ideas, but I thought about adding a confirm option when the form is submitted. The user clicks submit and a Javascript confirm prompt pops up which requires user interaction.
Would this prevent bots or could a bot figure this out too easy? Below is the code and JSFIddle to demonstrate my idea:
JSFIDDLE
$('button').click(function () {
if(Confirm()) {
alert('Form submitted');
/* perform a $.post() to php */
}
else {
alert('Form not submitted');
}
});
function Confirm() {
var _question = confirm('Are you sure about this?');
var _response = (_question) ? true : false;
return _response;
}

This is one problem that a lot of people have encountered. As user166390 points out in the comments, the bot can just submit information directly to the server, bypassing the javascript (see simple utilities like cURL and Postman). Many bots are capable of consuming and interacting with the javascript now. Hari krishnan points out the use of captcha, the most prevalent and successful of which (to my knowledge) is reCaptcha. But captchas have their problems and are discouraged by the World-Wide Web compendium, mostly for reasons of ineffectiveness and inaccessibility.
And lest we forget, an attacker can always deploy human intelligence to defeat a captcha. There are stories of attackers paying for people to crack captchas for spamming purposes without the workers realizing they're participating in illegal activities. Amazon offers a service called Mechanical Turk that tackles things like this. Amazon would strenuously object if you were to use their service for malicious purposes, and it has the downside of costing money and creating a paper trail. However, there are more erhm providers out there who would harbor no such objections.
So what can you do?
My favorite mechanism is a hidden checkbox. Make it have a label like 'Do you agree to the terms and conditions of using our services?' perhaps even with a link to some serious looking terms. But you default it to unchecked and hide it through css: position it off page, put it in a container with a zero height or zero width, position a div over top of it with a higher z-index. Roll your own mechanism here and be creative.
The secret is that no human will see the checkbox, but most bots fill forms by inspecting the page and manipulating it directly, not through actual vision. Therefore, any form that comes in with that checkbox value set allows you to know it wasn't filled by a human. This technique is called a bot trap. The rule of thumb for the type of auto-form filling bots is that if a human has to intercede to overcome an individual site, then they've lost all the money (in the form of their time) they would have made by spreading their spam advertisements.
(The previous rule of thumb assumes you're protecting a forum or comment form. If actual money or personal information is on the line, then you need more security than just one heuristic. This is still security through obscurity, it just turns out that obscurity is enough to protect you from casual, scripted attacks. Don't deceive yourself into thinking this secures your website against all attacks.)
The other half of the secret is keeping it. Do not alter the response in any way if the box is checked. Show the same confirmation, thank you, or whatever message or page afterwards. That will prevent the bot from knowing it has been rejected.
I am also a fan of the timing method. You have to implement it entirely on the server side. Track the time the page was served in a persistent way (essentially the session) and compare it against the time the form submission comes in. This prevents forgery or even letting the bot know it's being timed - if you make the served time a part of the form or javascript, then you've let them know you're on to them, inviting a more sophisticated approach.
Again though, just silently discard the request while serving the same thank you page (or introduce a delay in responding to the spam form, if you want to be vindictive - this may not keep them from overwhelming your server and it may even let them overwhelm you faster, by keeping more connections open longer. At that point, you need a hardware solution, a firewall on a load balancer setup).
There are a lot of resources out there about delaying server responses to slow down attackers, frequently in the form of brute-force password attempts. This IT Security question looks like a good starting point.
Update regarding Captcha's
I had been thinking about updating this question for a while regarding the topic of computer vision and form submission. An article surfaced recently that pointed me to this blog post by Steve Hickson, a computer vision enthusiast. Snapchat (apparently some social media platform? I've never used it, feeling older every day...) launched a new captcha-like system where you have to identify pictures (cartoons, really) which contain a ghost. Steve proved that this doesn't verify squat about the submitter, because in typical fashion, computers are better and faster at identifying this simple type of image.
It's not hard to imagine extending a similar approach to other Captcha types. I did a search and found these links interesting as well:
Is reCaptcha broken?
Practical, non-image based Captchas
If we know CAPTCHA can be beat, why are we still using them?
Is there a true alternative to using CAPTCHA images?
How a trio of Hackers brought Google's reCaptcha to its knees - extra interesting because it is about the audio Captchas.
Oh, and we'd hardly be complete without an obligatory XKCD comic.

Today I successfully stopped a continuous spamming of my form. This method might not always work of course, but it was simple and worked well for this particular case.
I did the following:
I set the action property of the form to mustusejavascript.asp which just shows a message that the submission did not work and that the visitor must have javascript enabled.
I set the form's onsubmit property to a javascript function that sets the action property of the form to the real receiving page, like receivemessage.asp
The bot in question apparently does not handle javascript so I no longer see any spam from it. And for a human (who has javascript turned on) it works without any inconvenience or extra interaction at all. If the visitor has javascript turned off, he will get a clear message about that if he makes a submission.

Your code would not prevent bot submission but its not because of how your code is. The typical bot out there will more likely do an external/automated POST request to the URL (action attribute). The typical bots aren't rendering HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. They are reading the HTML and acting upon them, so any client logic will not be executed. For example, CURLing a URL will get the markup without loading or evaluating any JavaScript. One could create a simple script that looks for <form> and then does a CURL POST to that URL with the matching keys.
With that in mind, a server-side solution to prevent bot submission is necessary. Captcha + CSRF should be suffice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery)

No Realy are you still thinking that Captcha or ReCap are Safe ?
Bots nowDays are smart and can easly recognise Letters on images Using OCR Tools (Search for it to understand)
I say the best way to protect your self from auto Form submitting is adding a hidden hash generated (and stored on the Session on your server of the current Client) every time you display the form for submitting !
That's all when the Bot or any Zombie submit the form you check if it the given hash equals the session stored Hash ;)
for more info Read about CSRF !

You could simply add captcha to your form. Since captchas will be different and also in images, bots cannot decode that. This is one of the most widely used security for all wesites...

you can not achieve your goal with javascript. because a client can parse your javascript and bypass your methods. You have to do validation on server side via captchas. the main idea is that you store a secret on the server side and validate the form submitted from the client with the secret on the server side.

You could measure the registration time offered no need to fill eternity to text boxes!

I ran across a form input validation that prevented programmatic input from registering.
My initial tactic was to grab the element and set it to the Option I wanted. I triggered focus on the input fields and simulated clicks to each element to get the drop downs to show up and then set the value firing the events for changing values. but when I tried to click save the inputs where not registered as having changed.
;failed automation attempt because window doesnt register changes.
;$iUse = _IEGetObjById($nIE,"InternalUseOnly_id")
;_IEAction($iUse,"focus")
;_IEAction($iUse,"click")
;_IEFormElementOptionSelect($iUse,1,1,"byIndex")
;$iEdit = _IEGetObjById($nIE,"canEdit_id")
;_IEAction($iEdit,"focus")
;_IEAction($iEdit,"click")
;_IEFormElementOptionSelect($iEdit,1,1,"byIndex")
;$iTalent = _IEGetObjById($nIE,"TalentReleaseFile_id")
;_IEAction($iTalent,"focus")
;_IEAction($iTalent,"click")
;_IEFormElementOptionSelect($iTalent,2,1,"byIndex")
;Sleep(1000)
;_IEAction(_IETagNameGetCollection($nIE,"button",1),"click")
This caused me to to rethink how input could be entered by directly manipulating the mouse's actions to simulate more selection with mouse type behavior. Needless to say I wont have to manualy upload images 1 by 1 to update product images for companies. used windows number before letters to have my script at end of the directory and when the image upload window pops up I have to use active accessibility to get the syslistview from the window and select the 2nd element which is a picture the 1st element is a folder. or the first element in a findfirstfile return only files call. I use the name to search for the item in a database of items and then access those items and update a few attributes after upload of images,then I move the file from that folder to a another folder so it doesn't get processed again and move onto the next first file in the list and loop until script name is found at the end of the update.
Just sharing how a lowly data entry person saves time, and fights all these evil form validation checks.
Regards.

This is a very short version that hasn't failed since it was implemented on my sites 4 years ago with added variances as needed over time. This can be built up with all the variables and if else statements that you require
function spamChk() {
var ent1 = document.MyForm.Email.value
var str1 = ent1.toLowerCase();
if (str1.includes("noreply")) {
document.MyForm.reset();
}
<input type="text" name="Email" oninput="spamChk()">
I had actually come here today to find out how to redirect particular spam bot IP addresses to H E L L .. just for fun

Great ideas.
I removed re-captcha a while back converted my contactform.html to contactform.asp and added this to the top (Obviously with some code in between to full-fill a few functions like sendmail, verify form filled out completely etc.).
<%
if Request.Form("Text") = 8 then
dothis
else
send them to google.com
end if
%>
On the form i stuck a basic text field with the name text so its just looks like anything not specifying what its for at all, I then stuck some text 2 lines above in red that states enter what 2 + 6 = in the box below to submit your request.

Best way to submit a form each time a section is completed

I have a requirement for a multi-part form which I want to apply some clever submission logic. Here's the idea, the form has 3 steps:
Personal Contact Details
Quote Details
Final Comments
As any good marketer I don't want to lose any data in the event that the user does not complete ALL the steps this (somewhat long) form.
As a result, what I would like to do is to have the form submit as each step is completed. So that in the event the user drops off we still capture the details on the completed steps.
Ideally I don't actually want to have the form submit 3 time as, if it was going to a simple email script, we'd get 3 results through for each 'complete' submission.
So I'm trying to find some clever way to store the data and submit it after a certain period of time or something along those lines.
I intend to be building this in HTML & JavaScrip (& if need be in PHP). Can anyone suggest the best route to achieve this (from past experience etc) before I get my feet wet!!!
Thanks for your time & any suggestions

The best way to achieve this is to have three separate forms, one for each page. Upon the submission of each form make a post() request to a PHP page on the server using jQuery, containing the serialized() form data. This PHP page then stores the contents of the form in a database for retrieval later.
If the ajax request is successful, show the next page of the form, otherwise display an error telling the user what happened.
Further reading on .post() and .serialize()

You need server support to store survey's temporary result. When user submits next part, you will simple append new answers to the query. The trick is in detecting abandoned queries, but I think if the survey will not be completed in 24h, you can safely assume that user closed browser and will not append any future data.
You must implement persistance on server, SQL database is the best option for PHP - millions of examples.

If I understand your question correctly then you are trying to have the behavior of Wizard in the same page, in that case you can use have three forms .
After completion of one section do an ajax call and save the filled in data in some temp database table, finally when user completes the form you can collate the temp table data and persist in your main table.
In case user doesn't complete all the steps then you can clean up your temp table after certain period of time or you can move it in some 'not-complete' table just in case you want to do some BI over the data.

I would serialize the response and store it in a database {id, stage1 data,stage2 data, last_entry_timestamp}.
Assuming that validation is done at each stage before storing the data,
Stage 1 I would check if an entry exists, and if not create a new entry, and store the serialized stage1 info and set timestamp, else retrieve stage 1 info. (back/forward)
Stage 2 If not set, I would update the created entry with the serialized stage2 info and set timestamp, otherwise retrieve and than update.
Stage 3 I would retrieve stage 1 and stage 2 info, and submit. I would then delete that entry.
Finally I would setup a cron job to look at all entries that are over X hours old, submit them, and delete the entry.

Shall I use javascript for page submission?

I am working on a big site, and in the site there is a search module. Searching is done by using a a lot of user submitted values, so in pagination I must pass all these data to the next page, appending the values to url make the url very big.
Sso how can I solve this issue? I am planning to use a javascript based page submission (POST) with all the values in hidden fields to the next page the read all the values from the next page.
Will it cause any problems? Or should I use database to keep the search criterias?

I would create a server side object, possibly with a database backend which is updated by the different pages.
It is at my opinion the most clear and easy solution. Giving parameters from page to page, either by post or javascript or cookie will work too but it's more of a quirk in my experience.
Also if a search query is so complex that it needs multiple pages to create it, it might be helpfull for the user to have all the data stored on the server so he can change it more easily by switching back and forth between the different pages.

I would store all the search criterias in some kind of session-store on the server when the initial search is being triggered.
For pagination I would retrieve the criterias from the session-store and then just show the appropriate results. Also I would append some kind of key to the pagination links (so this would be the only hidden post-field) under which the search criterieas can be found.
Even though the session is per user, you might have several search windows open within the same session, and you don't want to mess them up with the pagination.

In order to make a reliable search with pagination, we need to do a bit more than normal.
We need to handle the following cases.
Once search is done, user may choose to do browser back and forward. Here, if you are doing form submission on every page, it would be an overload. Also, if user presses browser refresh button, it will unnecessarily warn him that data is being submitted.
Searching on a large database with lots of criteria is costly. Hence, optimization is important.
So you should NOT do the following:
Submit data on every page change
Not store data in cookie. (This is not secure and not even reliable.)
For large database with complex query, cache the result in session.
In case, you need very up-to-date and real-time result, ignore point (3) and try doing partial search for every page.
Thus, for your case, you can do the following:
When user searches first time, make the form POST data to a search page.
This search page will store the search query in session and generate a unique id for it.
Now render the result page. The result page will be passed the search id (generated in point 2) and the page number. Example result.aspx?searchId=5372947645&page=2
The result page will puck up the query from session using the searchId and then provide result based on the page number sent.

Using hidden fields and POST method should be fine too unless you are able to get them on the next page right.

To supplement Sarfraz's answer...
It's not necessary to use Javascript to make a POST.
<form action="destination_url" method="POST">
...
</form>