Captcha

[Marc]

Just want to hear peoples' thoughts really. On your website contact forms, do you use Captcha or do you think it may put clients off? Must admit, I find them irritating as I struggle to read them half the time. Is it worth it in an attempt to stop spam?

 

[boyfalldown]

I relunctantly added one after a particularly bad spam attack - but kept it a simple as possible for the reasons that worry you

Have a look www.hughmillerphotography.co.uk/contact - its not hard to read or use

 

[Jimmy_Lemon]

Must admit it bugs me too, sometimes it is ok, sometimes it is just plain impossible to work out what you are supposed to be entering.

On my site I use just a simple maths question (granted the form plugin I am using came with it, it wasn't my idea) but it seems to work. Not sure if there is a stand alone system out there for it, like captcha, but I find it works most of the time, still get a bit of spam from it, but maybe once a fortnight, if that. I would imagine there are spam bots out there smart enough to crack it but it seems to work for me.

 

[RacingSnake]

I use bigocaptcha which shows (upto) 6 numbers on a flying flag - much much easier to read and use than that damned 're-captcha' which quite frankly, I hate.

 

[Marc]

Thanks for the replies.

The software I use has the option of Captcha but It also has a "Use My Own Keys" option so I may investigate that further.

Hugh, I like yours, seems a very good solution

 

[Karlos]

I don't use a captcha any more, Instead I employ a few other tricks such as a honeypot and checking for html in the enquiry, it results in a much better user experience, is totally accessible and is just as effective at stopping spam.

 

[onomatopoeia]

We don't use one on the "contact us" part of our web page. I get up to half a dozen spams a day through it. That's computer software rather than photography though.

The person who wrote the form php code failed to sanity check inputs on it and allowed it to accept an unlimited length email address. With multiple @ symbols and semi-colons. So one weekend we spammed several thousand people after the script was exploited and ended up on half the mail relay blacklists on the internet. Joy. :bang:

I worked out what had happened pretty quickly on Monday morning when /var/log/exim had taken over most of the server disk space

 

[david1701]

I do, but I pick up that account on my phone so spam would **** me off