Spam-Filtered Contact Forms
If you have a business Web site, then obviously you need some way for potential customers to contact you. Contact forms are one of the most popular ways to do this because they're fast, easy to use, and allow you to specify the information you want from your customers.
The problem is that contact forms are also a target for spambots (robots whose only purpose in their miserable lives is to scour the Internet for contact forms, and use them to spam the recipients).
Go ahead and try it: Put an ordinary contact form on your site, and see what happens after a few weeks. You'll be deluged with every manner of spam that there is. Spambots exist for the very purpose of finding unsecured contact forms and bombarding them with spam.
No worries, though. I have a solution.
Spam-Filtered Contact Forms
After several years of testing, I've come up with a system that traps more than 99 percent of spambots, and yet has an extremely low false-positive rate of less than one-tenth of one percent.
Better yet, my forms filter out spam without using annoying "CAPTCHA" images or "Are you human?" puzzles that frustrate and drive away potential customers. My forms are based on proprietary scripts that look for behavioral differences between humans and robots and evaluate every submissiom politely and silently, so the spambot won't even know it's been caught and its spam discarded.
How does it work?
When a message is identified as spammy, it's handled in the way you specify when the script is installed. You have three choices: Messages identified as spam can be silently deleted, sent to an alternate email address, or sent to your primary email address with the subject line modified to identify the message as spam. Most people choose to silently delete spam messages because there are very few or no false positives.
How does my system identify spam messages?
Frankly, that's a secret. I spent years developing these scripts, and I'm not going to tell the whole world (and especially the spammers) how they work. But I'll tell you what my system is not.
My anti-spam contact form filtering system is different from all others in the following ways:
- My spam-free contact forms don't ask users to read and re-type "CAPTCHA" images (those little squiggly letters that are hard to read).
- My system doesn't ask users stupid questions, have them do math problems, or solve puzzles.
- My system doesn't ask users to identify cats, dogs, or any other animals.
- My spam-filtering system doesn't rely solely on blocklists.
- My forms rely mainly on behavioral analysis, not content filtering; so misspelling the word "Viagra" won't fool my filters.
- My system is specifically designed to filter out robot-submitted spam, which accounts for the overwhelming bulk of contact form spam.
All of my new client sites automatically include a spam-filtered contact form, at no extra charge. I can also add a spam-filtered contact form to most existing Web sites.
For more information (and to see a real-live example of my spam-free contact forms at work), please contact me.