Another advantage of invisible captchas over their conventional counterpart is they are more accessible. Invisible captchas provide a frictionless way of ensuring a human visitor is submitting forms on your website. For example, it may monitor mouse, touch, or key stroke events. The captcha technology sits invisibly on your website and monitors events on your page to determine if a human is present. To overcome this problem, some captcha systems now provide invisible versions. A downside, however, is that they can be frustrating for someone completing the form, particularly if the captcha technology does not accept their response and requires subsequent retries, and can be problematic from an accessibility perspective also. Another popular captcha with a focus on privacy is hCaptcha.Ĭaptchas provide one of the most efficient ways of preventing form spam, not least because they require a form of human interaction that is incredibly difficult for spam bots to circumvent. There are various providers of captcha technologies including the most popular, reCAPTCHA, provided by Google. The captcha is intended to distinguish human from machine input.

You check the box to confirm you are a human and then you may have to click additional boxes that contain a certain object such as a traffic signal or motorbike. We’re all familiar with the conventional captcha challenge. The preventative measures discussed in this article are: The best approach is to implement spam prevention measures when the form is originally created to avoid problems later on. Regardless of whether your form was coded by hand or created with a WordPress form plugin, it is susceptible to such attacks unless you implement additional strategies to protect it from malicious use. (So maybe it’s more of a migraine than a headache.) This can result in your domain name getting blacklisted, SMTP services being locked out due to abuse, significant work in resolving and dealing with the situation as well as performance degradation of your website. Once a bot identifies a vulnerability, your form can be used many thousands of times in a short space of time for maliciously. Most form spam occurs when bots discover your form and then attempt to use it as a gateway to submit undesirable information such as abusive language, links to malware or phishing websites, and links to other illegal activities. Preventing form spam helps alleviate this headache. Although your site visitors never see it, form spam is a headache for site owners – especially if you get email or text notifications every time a visitor completes a form on your site.

Google form spamming bot