Stop spam with a honey pot

I am hearing a substantial increase in reports of spam coming in from website forms, particularly the user registration forms a lot of my clients use. There seems to be an uptick lately that has required us to add some additional filtering to the forms. Initially we approached this with adding the “CAPTCHA” – those random letters and number images that need to be typed into a field in order to successfully submit the form. Those are somewhat effective but we now have another tool – the honey pot. No, this isn’t one of my own terms (some of you know of my beekeeping efforts)!

The honey pot works by adding an additional hidden field to the form. Spam bots love form fields and when they encounter a form field they will fill it out, even if the field is hidden from the user interface. We can create a form field that should be left blank, but hide it from human users. When the form is submitted you can check to see if there’s a value for the field and block the form submission.

Please contact me if you are having spam submission issues and let’s see if we can’t stop them with some sticky honey.