Feature: Reverse CAPTCHA
In these days when automated web crawlers are common inhabitants of the Internet and form-spam is rampant, website administrators are searching everywhere for technology that will help separate the robots on their sites from the real people. Robots, spiders, worms and hackers are all working hard to find new ways to exploit forms on websites, attempting to submit invalid information in an effort to break into secure systems, or even simply spam the website administrators to promote their products.
We have all seen the additional security measures people have put in place in an attempt to block the unwanted spammers, while still allowing their clients easy access to send in information. Unfortunately, most of these systems are complicated to use, adding extra work and frustration for the client, such as requiring the person to read letters on a multi-colored graphic and type them into the form. Then, if you miss a letter or type something in wrong, you have to start over from the beginning.
In FormBuilder, we have installed what we call a “Reverse CAPTCHA“. Simply put, it keeps the spiders out, while allowing real people in without making their lives any more difficult.
How to Use:
To find and activate the Reverse CAPTCHA controls, go to the FormBuilder interface on your blog, and click to edit one of your forms. When creating new fields on the form, you will see that one of the FIELD TYPE’s in the dropdown box is “spam blocker”. Simply select that option as your field type and give it a name. (something you wouldn’t use on that particular form.. ie. BIRTH_DATE)
The idea of this field is that it is hidden to regular users of your site, so when the form is submitted by a REAL user, the value of that field should be blank. However, spiders and automated form hacking scripts would see that field and attempt to submit information to it. If information is submitted in that field, the entire form submission will be ignored, resulting in less spam in your in-box.
For additional spam prevention, you can rename the CSS which is used to identify this FormBuilder Field. This should help prevent robots from locking on to a particular CSS field and ignoring forms which are labelled with it. To rename the CSS field, go to your main FormBuilder management page, and change the field value under the Spam Blocker heading.
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August 26th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
[...] added to the code and interface linking to documentation regarding how to use the built-in “Reverse Captcha” spam blocking [...]