Are You Experiencing SPAM Overload From Your Website Forms? Maybe a CAPTCHA solution will work for you!

What is a CAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart [sometimes spelled all lowercase]) is basically a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether an internet user is human. CAPTCHAs are often used to stop bots and other automated programs from using blogs, contact forms, and other internet forms to send spam, gain higher search engine rankings, take part in online polls, etc. A CAPTCHA usually comes in the form of an image of slightly distorted alphanumeric characters, like these:

A human can usually read the characters in the image without too much difficulty. A bot program is able to recognize that the content contains an image, but it has no idea what the image is, or what characters are displayed on it.

To accommodate the visually-impaired, some CAPTCHAs come in the form of an audio in which the human listens to a series of letters or short words and types what he hears to prove he is not a bot.

Do they work?

CAPTCHAs obviously will not prevent a malevolent human being from spamming your site — but CAPTCHAs will stop the great majority of bots. If the site in question draws low to mid-level traffic, it is very unlikely your CAPTCHA will ever be broken. (And good CAPTCHAs can withstand the wiliest bots on high-traffic sites, too.) The bottom line: implementing a well-designed CAPTCHA can reduce a serious email spam problem to non-existence or a minor nuisance. What's more, CAPTCHAs are by definition fully automated — once you implement a CAPTCHA solution, you can pretty much sit back and watch it work.

Pros

• They are very effective in reducing email spam.
• Generally easy to implement on most contact-us forms or blogs.

Cons

• Accessibility, or lack thereof. Visually impaired users and screen readers cannot decipher visual CAPTCHAs, and thus can be blocked from your pages and services.

Requirements

In order to use a CAPTCHA, a server-side scripting language such as PHP, ASP, or Cold Fusion must be enabled.

Call Us!!

Give us a call at PA Internet Marketing. We recently added CAPTCHAs to all our forms, and haven’t had a single SPAM email since! We'd like to share this solution with you. It’s really easy to implement. Call us for pricing: 610-458-8040.