If receiving thousands of unwanted spam messages is not enough, spam bots are now targeting web forms too! This means that if you have a web form like a contact us form on your site, you could receive spam through that form.

Spam is an unfortunate but inevitable problem on the internet. Most webmasters have only just realized that their registration, membership, contact us, feedback forms and any other kind of interactive web forms are vulnerable to spam bots.

What is a spambot?

Spambots are automated programs that actively search for forms on websites. The spambot then analyses the form to identify whether the form is suitable for spamming purposes. They then fill all the form fields with unwanted information and automatically posts the web form content to you.

How to stop spambots

You must use a program that can tell you whether it is a human or a computer that is trying to use the web form. This program is called a CAPTCHA an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. CAPTCHAs commonly do this by displaying a distorted image with randomly generated text or numbers. The user must then identify the text in the image.

Computers cannot read, so it makes it tough for them to analyze what text is being displayed in a CAPCHA. Computers can use optical character recognition (OCR) to identify text images. This is why the image has been distorted. Plain text can be easily recognized with OCR.

This dramatically reduces your chances of receiving spam through your web forms.

We use reCAPTCHA!

All our web form services here at Improvate IT have been modified to use CAPTCHAs. More specifically, we use reCAPTCHA. It is a free CAPTCHA that helps digitize books. Visit http://recaptcha.net/ for more info on how they do it. We have seen a dramatic decline on spambot abuse since the implementation of the CAPTCHA concept.

Improvate IT Web Form Service

We recognize the fact that webmasters require web form interactivity on their sites. We also realize that most webmasters do not have access to scripting facilities like PHP, ASP and ASP.NET. This is why Improvate IT has developed a web form service that is easy to implement, that is secured by a CAPTCHA service. You only need to add two lines of code to your existing form to integrate your form with our web form service. You do not need any scripting functionality on your website!

How Does The Web Form Service Work?

You simply add two lines of code... The user then submits the form to Improvate IT, where a CAPTCHA service verifies the user as being a computer or human. When the CAPCHA confirms that the form was submitted by human... Improvate IT stores the form contents in your control panel and emails you the form to your computer.