St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Posts Tagged ‘stop form spam’

Stop Form Spam - but how?

Form spam, everyone hates it.  That’s when some automated software finds the contact form on your web site and uses to tell you about cheesy offers you’d rather not hear, like how they can get to to #1 on Google for anything you’d like for $9.99!  The most common approach has been to use an image based CAPTCHA script to make sure that a human is filling out the form.  The problem is, they really irritate users and now they make programs for spammers that can read the image the Captcha produces so now image based captcha just doesn’t really work any more.

What’s a web Designer to do then?  We have the answer.  We needed a custom script that was secure, easy for users and easy for web designers.  Years ago we developed one for a client, but it was a bit too custom for general release.  So we simplified it so that even an entry level web designer could customize it and implement it.    We made it more secure and kept easy for the one filling out the form to use.  We liked it so much we use it on our own contact page.   So far it has blocked 100% of the form spam and also blocked everyone who has tried to access the form handler page directly (robots, pranksters and hackers, o my!)

Download the source code, see how it works and get support on our Stop Form Spam page.