One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.\u00a0 There is a dilemma presented when wanting to have potential customers or clients contact you or your company.\u00a0 Either your email has to be publicly posted or you will need to enable a form to allow quick and easy contact.\u00a0 When you do implement either choice, spammers will come and they will do as much damage as is possible.<\/p>\n
Email link \u2013 bad idea<\/strong><\/p>\n The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.\u00a0 Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.\u00a0 Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.\u00a0 If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only \u2013 this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.\u00a0 Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.<\/p>\n Contact form \u2013 can be attacked<\/strong><\/p>\n If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.\u00a0 This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.\u00a0 However, most email forms have a standard \u201cname\u201d, \u201cemail\u201d,\u00a0 \u201csubject\u201d, \u201ccontent\u201d style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.\u00a0 Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form \u2013 computer to computer.\u00a0 What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.\u00a0 This is where Captcha comes in.<\/p>\n Contact form with Captcha \u2013 better idea<\/strong><\/p>\n Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.\u00a0 The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.\u00a0 The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.\u00a0 However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.\u00a0 Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.<\/p>\n This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.\u00a0 After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.\u00a0 You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.\u00a0 But this is not a feasible option \u2013 after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.\u00a0 So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.\u00a0 There is a dilemma presented when wanting to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1297,1301,1300,17,432,102,260],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security-issues","tag-captcha","tag-captcha-coding","tag-contact-form","tag-email","tag-exploit","tag-security","tag-spam"],"views":125,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}