For today’s marketing meeting, we’ll look at spam. No mincing words: spam sucks. Many tools are available for the site owner to reduce the amount of spam they receive. One good way to get a handle on spam is to use a contact form.
A contact form allows visitors to contact you without the risk of a mail hyperlink for spiders to crawl and harvest. There is a fine line between making it easy for visitors to contact you and avoiding spam. A contact form does just that.
When creating the contact form in XHTML, you have an opportunity to gather more specific information from your visitors. How did they find you? How to they preferred to be contacted? Asking these questions can help you better communicate with your visitors and give you important information regarding the success of your marketing techniques.
Fine Tuning Your Contact Form
One way to execute the form is to use a script. A script gives you extra control over your form and puts extra security measures in place to avoid spam. For example, you can have a script validate fields for proper content such as an email address or phone number. You can also require fields to be completed.
Avoid bots
You can also implement a captcha field on your form to prevent automated filling out of forms. WordPress has some nice plugins that you can use with your blog or CMS. The official Captcha site can also provide code.
Unfortunately, scammers use other tricks to get around security measures. The human element that is required of captcha fields is used to fill out forms with spam. A good way to prevent this is to customize your script to find stop words like http, Viagra, etc.
While a contact form will not curb all spam, it does give you another weapon in the fight against spam.
Photo by dok1
