Tech For Free!

These days its not uncommon to see a web form that requires you to enter a series of malformed letters, or to answer a math question in an effort to prove that your submission as been made by you—A HUMAN (as opposed to a computer). This process of validating human vs. computer is commonly known as CAPTCHA, which is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and its used to block spam submissions made through a website.

One of the websites I manage was recently the target of spammers. I tried implementing several CAPTCHA options, but the easiest one to use is called “reCAPTCHA”. Its a great FREE tech tool (service) that was easy to implement and it took minutes to setup. Once setup, the spam stopped. Success!

reCAPTCHA is especially great because it does not require you to add an “action” or “onsubmit” to your html form so you don’t need to mess with your already working code (chances are you’re already using those form elements). Implementation of other CAPTCHA scripts would have required that, and would therefore require some rewriting of php—not really my game.
Another great feature about reCAPTCHA is that its accessible. Users can choose to either type in what they see, or hear. If your website requires adherence to Section 508 of the Disabilities Act, then this may a good solution for you.

Using reCAPTCHA is easy:

• Simply visit http://recaptcha.net/whyrecaptcha.html and sign-up for a free account.
• Upon submitting the form you will be prompted for the domain name of the website in which you will be implementing reCAPTCHA. Once you have submitted your domain name you will then receive a public key and private key. Keep this information handy as you will need to use it when adding reCAPTCHA to your web page.
• Next visit http://recaptcha.net/plugins/php/ as it includes instructions and the link to the file you will need to include on your web server, as well as the script to add to your web form (assuming you are using php). You don’t need to know php to implement this, but you do need to have your web pages hosted on a php enabled web server.

IF YOU’RE NOT USING PHP, there are other reCAPTCHA options available to you.

The  image above shows how the reCAPTCHA php script sits on the page in relation to the existing html. As you can see in this example, the script sits by itself, and in this case, I have made it the last item in form.

I opted to implement a php solution on my page, but reCAPTCHA offers other solutions that may be of use to you if running php is not an option. Additionally, they offer several plugins for some common content management systems.