Contact Forms: The CAPTCHA Field

You know those funny characters you see on forms that are usually on a warped background or that have letters heading in different directions? Most professional websites have those fields and almost all of my clients have those as well (even QW Consulting's contact page does).

Despite their popularity a lot of people don't understand why those are there. Aren't they a pain for the users to fill out? Besides, who can read some of those images?

Well, let's start off at the beginning. Those fields are called a CAPTCHA which is an acronym for "Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart". The name pretty much says it all: computers can't read the characters and therefore it takes a human to actually submit the form.

Why are they needed at all? Who else but a human would submit the form? Applications have been created to scour the web, looking for contact forms that are vulnerable. Once found, the applications submit spam results through those contact forms. The spam results submitted through the contact form can be a nuisance or it can contain links to malicious websites.

A simple CAPTCHA form will stop that application from submitting a form full of spam because the application can't read those funny characters with the weird background, weird spacing and the letters going in different directions. A human though just has to take an extra second to enter in the characters.

Now the real question: why should you be worried about this? Sometimes the spam results from a form are just a mild nuisance. You can delete those emails and it isn't really a big deal. However, I had a client about a year ago who didn't have a CAPTCHA and was getting so much spam submitted through his contact forms that he maxed out his email capacity at his host. This meant that his inbox was full and could no longer receive valid emails. As soon as we put in the CAPTCHA, this problem stopped immediately.

Okay, so maybe this CAPTCHA field is helpful, but won't the users of your site be confused by it? Truth be told, most websites use a CAPTCHA field now before allowing a user to submit data through a form. Given how popular this is, the majority of people understand how to use this field. Of course, you do want to make the CAPTCHA field easy to use. One method is to make sure that you avoid commonly mistaken characters (for instance, you want to make sure your CAPTCHA doesn't use both the number one and a lower case L which can look the same).

If you'd like to prevent contact form spam on your website, contact QW Consulting today.

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