Spam prevention without using Captcha

  • rsvpfree
    Asked on March 9, 2015 at 5:43 AM

    Dear Jotform  -  A SUGGESTION

    I have a personal dislike of Captcha as a technique, and will do everything I can to avoid it.

    I think it is bad design practise to use Captcha because anything which makes life harder for your users is never a good idea.

    I know of what I speak because my eyesight is not 100% so I often have difficulty reading other people Captchas.

    My suggestion is to use the "false email field" technique: the field in which you ask for a user's email should be called anything but email (say 'fred' or 'malein') but you create a hidden field whose name is 'email' then spambots are likely to place an email address in that hidden field (since they usually read the source code, not having eyes to see the actual page!)

    Therefore, you can discard any submission with anything in the hidden 'email' field as being spam.

    My suggestion is that Jotform includes a function in each form called 'False Email' with options: enabled/disabled, and if enabled an email address to which any submission with data in the hidden field is sent.

    This way, the form owner can collect data on spams submitted, without their good inbox being cluttered with them.

    What do you think, Jotform?

  • Aytekin JotForm Founder
    Replied on March 9, 2015 at 6:01 AM

    JotForm alreay has many similar and other secret techniques to prevent the spam. So, CAPTCHA is not needed in your JotForm forms at all. W have it because many people ask for it. 

  • rsvpfree
    Replied on March 9, 2015 at 6:05 AM

    Thank you, aytekin. Do you have any articles on how to use such techniques?

  • Aytekin JotForm Founder
    Replied on March 9, 2015 at 8:05 AM

    You don't need to do anything to enable/use them. We already have them on all JotForm forms.

    We don't talk about the techniques we use since that would help spammers. 

    Did you ever received spam on JotForm? 

  • rsvpfree
    Replied on March 10, 2015 at 4:19 AM

    My forms are still under development, and have not yet been "released into the wild", so I don't know if I will get any!

    I was just trying to improve my understanding of Jotform while learning how best to use it   : )

    I'll get back to you if spam becomes a problem to me.....

  • Jan
    Replied on March 10, 2015 at 10:57 AM

    Please get back to us if you have any spam issues, so that we can investigate about it. 

    Let us know if you need any help. We'll be more than happy to assist you.

    Thank you for choosing JotForm.