Stopping the spambots
Recently, spambots have been trying to make my life difficult… Whether it’s creating new users and posting spam to forums that I manage or sending spam messages using my contact form, they’ll always find a way to annoy people. But no more!
I received quite a few spam messages last week from my contact form, and that got me thinking about how to stop them. I’ve read that the usual “type the letters you see” trick doesn’t work any more since lots of bots can now read the text inside the images. While I was thinking, I remembered an article about displaying random colours and asking the user to name them. Since spambots can’t (currently) decipher colours and name them, this is an excellent idea.
However, I couldn’t find a script that would do this job, so I went about writing my own. The result is the Random Colour Validator which chooses a random colour, displays it, and then validates the user’s response. I’m going to apply it to my contact form soon, so feel free to try it out for yourself. if you have any questions, there’s always the (now protected!) contact form.