Many of us have a contact form on the contact page of our website. We usually set this form with the following fields: name, company, email, message, or something similar. We set a destination email address to receive an email of every contact form filled.
Great, it’s all up and running in minutes and everything looks like its working.
You start receiving messages from people who are interested in your business, products, etc.
After a period of time you start receiving an odd message mixed with your normal messages that don’t seem to make sense or are not filed out correctly according the form layout. You say to yourself that this could be a fluke.
More time passes and you start to receive more of these odd messages and it starts to become annoyance.
Why is this happening?
For some web development platforms setting up a contact form to your website you may have created potential vulnerability to automated attacks.
Internet hackers who want to try to gain access to your website for malicious intent will use automated processes to look for contact forms and insert code to exploit a weakness.
Others will try to spam your contact form with useless selling links to products in a cynical way to drive traffic to their products.
Either way, what is one to do? Get rid of the contact form and limit communication to the outside world?
Enter CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA is a technology to verify a person is entering information on a contact form not an automated script.
reCAPTCHA is the first level of this technology to be implemented. When a contact form first loads on a web page a random image with information is loaded. You have to enter the numbers and/or words on the image to match the answer key. Extremely difficult for an automated program to read numbers and/or letters from a picture.
No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA takes the technology further by allowing ease of use for the person entering the contact form to verify they are not a robot or automated process.
reCAPTCHA also accommodates visual impaired individuals by providing audio options.
Experience has shown by placing a CAPTCHA on a contact form eliminates 99% of all junk and automated scripts of ever getting through the contact form process.
Depending on the website platform you are using placing a CAPTCHA option on your contact form may require some technical knowledge of website development.
Need to enforce your contact form with CAPTCHA but don’t know how? Contact Success Media Services and our website development can help you secure your contact form quickly. We are here to help.