Spam-free forms

It is a constant source of irritation that most forms submitted from our web sites are simply spam. And although it's not the friendliest way of securing a form's integrity I've finally succumbed to using an image based 'captcha' system as a way of separating the real visitors from the automated form-filling spambots.

It did have the benefit of being very easy to install and is just one of a large collection of useful Dreamweaver extensions from hotdreamweaver.com

However, I also came across this useful work-around on webdoodles which has the benefit of not having to use php or captchas. Which would be good news for visitors with poor eyesight but not quite as robust as a captcha system.

And the reason for this is explained in a blog entry by a French man who writes under the pseudonym of Ploum (surely that should be Plume?). In it he describes one route that combines the best of both a captcha and an invisible text field. Thereby giving the robust security of the captcha image while avoiding upsetting those with less than 20:20 vision.