Hello all,

 

I am just about to finish a website for a client but I'm struggling to find a suitable form script for the contact page.

 

I've just pulled the first website I created a few years back as spam bots harvested my form info and have been relentlessly bombarding me with junk mail. Thankfully the emails have stopped, but I'm cautious now about how to approach contact forms.

 

I've read alot about captchas, math-guards, spam preventative questions, hidden fields, etc.. but would like to know from experience what other designers use and trust.

 

Captchas to me look a bit unsightly- i have seen some more attractive examples on the net but am unsure where to find the resources. I like the idea of preventative questions ie: 'What colour is the sky?', but again am unsure how to implement this.

 

Any advice or recommendations are gratefully received.

 

Regards,

 

Jon

I suppose it depends on what level of protection you require. We opted for Captcha because it offers a very good level of anti-spam protection.

I have a few other suggestions if you dont want to go the Captcha route:

 

1) Have a preset number of questions (maybe 10-20) with preset one word answers that the user can type, such as what colour is the sea,

2) Display a word with one letter missing that the user has to type in

3) Display an easy maths question such as what is 1+3

4) Display a line and ask the user to guess the angle of the line

5) Display a colour and ask the user to type the name of it (Issues for colour blind people or people using monochrome displays)

6) Play the sound of a number or word and ask the user to type it in (Issues for deaf people or if the user has no access to sound)

 

The only issue with most of the above is that they are quite easy to get around for a computer

 

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

Are you aware of any decent PHP form scripts I could look at to use with my website? I have a PHP script which isn't protected at all.

 

How do I implement a Captcha?

 

I have zero experience in PHP programming!

I actually use ASP.NET so I've not used PHP for a fair few years, although looking around there appears to be a few. This one http://www.phpcaptcha.org/ looks like it is quite easy to integrate into your web site (see the quickstart guide). Its a case of adding a couple of lines of code to your form processing code file to check that the code that the user entered matches the image that was generated.

Thanks for your help. I'll look at this link.