If you’ve ever visted the home of my text messaging sites, freetext.biz you may have noticed it has a contact form. Lately, I’ve been getting about 100 messages / day on the contact form. The problem with that though, is that only 1-2 of them are from actual humans. The rest are from spam bots sending me URLs.
I’m not sure why a spam bot would want to send me a URL in my email, but that’s their perogative.
Anyway.. you’ll notice now that I added a simple math captcha to the form. Here’s what it looks like:
Why did I choose a mathcha instead of the standard image? It’s because I think that images are sometimes hard to read, and usually annoy visitors. Don’t believe me? Check out this ticketmaster example:
(note: captcha is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart… mathcha is a made up word that really means math captcha)
If you want to do something similiar, here’s how you can do it in just about 10 lines of code:
on your form page:
on your form handler:
There ya go. That's a 30 second mathcha. Feel free to use it however you want. I know it's really simple stuff, but let me know if it actually helps anybody.
Tsk HG, that’s some horrible (X)HTML you’re spitting out there!
Don’t you know you’re a role model to the kids nowadays?
Comment by Alexander — March 20, 2007 @ 4:27 am
XHTML? what’s that? hehehe
It’s all about the 4.01 transitional baby!
Comment by Ryan — March 20, 2007 @ 7:47 am