Spam! Everyone hates it (except perhaps the spammers). Email spam is the type of spam most people are familiar with. It is a plague on the Internet and in my opinion email spam has all but ruined a great communications technology. However, this article is about spam that comes from your website forms and some ways to deal with that.
If you have any kind of form on your website, such as a contact us form or a comments form on a blog site (like WordPress) you are susceptible to spam. Spammers often attempt to take advantage of these mechanisms to generate traffic to their own sites.
Most spam isn’t created manually by a human. Instead, spammers use computer programs called “bots” to automatically fill out web forms to create spam, and these bots can generate spam much faster than a human can review it.
The main defense against this is adding something to your forms called CAPTCHA.
What is CAPTCHA?
The simple definition is that it’s a test to ensure that a human is filling in the form, not another computer or some kind of automated compute program. The word is an acronym for ”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (click here for more). You have no doubt seen this before, for example if you’ve posted ads to a site like Craigslist. A typical CAPTCHA contains an image of distorted letters which humans can read, but are not easily understood by computers. Here’s an example:
If you have a contact us form, or other such form on your site, you may or may not have a CAPTCHA function. Most developers for smaller sites don’t add this “out of the box” as it takes a bit more coding than they usually have budgeted for the project. If you’re not sure ask you site developer if you have this and if not what it would take to add it. If’ you have a blog site, such as WordPress, there are plugins available that will allow you to add CPATCHA to the blog comment forms.
Google has recently released a free CAPTCHA service called ‘reCAPTCHA.’ As part of that service they have even created a free WordPress plugin. I have just installed it on this blog and after I see how it works I’ll add another post to report on this plugin. Click here for more on Google reCAPTCHA resources.
