Tutorial #178

Protecting Forms Against Spam Bots

Level: Beginner
Requirements: Dreamweaver
Language: ASP, VBScript, HTML, CSS

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Introduction

Recently, I have had a few questions about how I set up the security code on the contact form for the site.

So instead of a quick reply to the forum, I thought it best to cover quick and simple form security in a small tutorial. There are quite a few methods for form security around that really do good justice towards keeping the bots at bay when it comes to form submission. This is a particular problem with things such as guestbooks and, in my experience, contact forms.

One of the most popular techniques around is the CAPTCHA (http://www.captcha.net/) method, this generates a selection of letters or numbers (or indeed both) and creates an image containing them in various mixed up and distorted ways. This is an excellent method for prevention against it and does work well.

Another recent addition to the whole form security techniques (and probably the cutest ever security measure) is the KittenAuth (http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth) which will display 9 random images of kittens and ask the user to select 2 or 3 that fall into certain categories. Cute, fun and again does the job.

However, as much as I enjoy writing about these subjects, I wont cover any of these in any further detail, what we will cover today are two methods that I currently employ on the WebThang site for form security.

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Tutorial By	Submitted On	Views	Rating
Rob Boyle	24/03/2008	5753	Rate Tutorial