Preventing spam in your online forms

How do we protect website forms from spam? If we built your website, we have included protection automatically. Want to know how it works and what you can do yourself? Read on.

Websites often include forms for collecting visitor or customer information, such as contact, comment, registration and order forms. They help you communicate with your audience, but spammers can also misuse them.

What are spammers and spambots?

They are people or bots that fill in forms with false or harmful information. They may advertise another website, spread phishing links or malware, or harm competitors. Spam can clutter your website, overload your inbox, compromise security and damage your reputation.

What can you do yourself?

A simple way to reduce spam is to set a maximum length for each form field. Spammers often use long messages to include links and advertisements, so limiting characters can block some of these submissions. Do not set limits so low that they frustrate real customers. Find a balance between security and ease of use.

What do we do?

We use invisible fields to mislead spambots. These fields are hidden from real visitors but visible to bots reading the website’s code. If a bot fills in the field and submits the form, the system rejects the message as spam.

The system automatically places these hidden fields in forms, so you do not need to do anything. In the system described here, the computer filling the hidden field is then blocked to prevent repeated attempts.

If you still receive spam through your website, contact us. If these settings are unavailable, we can update your system to add the feature.