Since 1999

 

1 minutes estimated reading time.

Tired of Contact Form Spam?

By — Published

Many of my customers have been receiving an increasing amount of spam through their website contact forms. The spammers fill in fake names, email addresses, phone numbers, and a junk message with lots of links. To counter these spammers, one must make the web-form difficult for a spambot to fill out and yet keep it usable for valued human guests. CAPTCHAS are used in a lot of places online, but randomized field names are preferable because no strain is put on a human guest.

I presented a paper, called Spam and the Ongoing Battle for Safe Communications, on randomized field names at last year’s Software Industry Conference.