If you have a website, you should have a contact form. You want visitors to contact you as easily as possible.
That bad part that everyone with a website knows, is that you will be flooded with SPAM from SPAMbots along with any actual contact your receive. It’s a total hassle to deal with all the fake contact to weed out the actual prospects.
The CAPTCHA Problem
The common solution to solve the robot problem is to put up some hard to read image that only a human can decipher. The idea is that a robot can’t fill in your form, so you will only get forms filled out by real humans. This is know as a CAPTCHA.
THIS IS A HORRIBLE SOLUTION! Speaking on behalf of humans, we hate filling out these puzzles. Is that a 9 or an a? I don’t know. I give up.
You’ve gone from putting a form on your site to make contact easy to putting up a roadblock which makes contact a hassle. You may as well not have a contact form at this point.
There are other solutions such as having the visitors solve a math problem, but again, these are roadblocks you are putting in the way.
The Honeypot to the Rescue
The solution that I use catches the robots and doesn’t bother website visitors. It’s a trap that robots can’t resist known as a honeypot. Basically, it’s a field that you put in your form that is only visible to SPAMbots.
Every form on my site (or any of my clients’ sites) has a hidden honeypot. Can you see it? You would have to look at the source code like a SPAMbot to fill it in.
This solves this problem without hassling your true audience. It’s like a miracle.
You may still get humans spamming you, but a honeypot will drastically slow the current of crap that can fill your inbox.
