Periodic Fable

Once upon a time, in the early days of the Web, we used to create web pages that could be updated directly by users, and use them for wonderful collaborative projects and to comment on one another’s websites. But that was ten years ago, before the terrible blight on the internet that is spam. Now no-one would dream of making a user-contributory web application without layers and layers of security.

Anyone with a web-based form such as a guestbook, blog with comments or feedback form now knows that such forms have to be protected from robots – created by major nuisances – that trawl the internet and automatically fill in and submit forms hoping to add their pornographic or pharmaceutical websites to your web page.

At the very least, anyone with such a form needs to make sure that all comments or entries are moderated so that they do not automatically go on the page. A second level of protection is to use a captcha: this is an image generated automatically for each submission. The writer has to type the captcha in correctly and it is validated – this means that robots will be stopped. There is an example of a captcha on this blog if you try to add a comment (and our comments are also moderated).

There is a useful free service from protectwebform.com which can be used to protect your forms. It’s the easiest captcha to use that I’ve yet seen and it can be customised, with a WordPress plugin if your blog is built in WordPress.

Originally published on reachfurther.com