I hope this is a valid question to ask here... but knows anyone a better spam protection than reCAPTCHA? We've now using reCAPTCHA for some time but got now the situation that obviously more and more spam comes through. Is there any better but still more or less user friendly spam protection you can recommend? It can be just a concept or also a (free) service.
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5 Answers
One alternative to CAPTCHA and less intrusive with better UX is the honeypot method. It's rather simple: you create an input field in the HTML that you hide with javascript. You then check on the server side whether it was filled in or not, if left empty the visitor is human, if filled in a bot.
The reason it works is because javascript is still too computationally expensive for spambots to use (spam is about quantity not quality) so they don't bother parsing it. Originally CSS was suggested to hide the field, however many spambots do parse CSS to detect hidden elements on a page as it's not that expensive.
A friend of mine who told me about the method reported so far a 100% success rate in protecting his sign-up forms using this little neat trick.
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We already use this but with CSS not js yet, I'll give it a try and mark your answer as correct if it is going to work fine.– floriankCommented Jun 21, 2012 at 11:02
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Thanks for posting this reply. I knew the term honeypot (but not what it meant, exactly), and I knew of the technique but like burzum I was familiar with it as a CSS based solution. Clear and concise answer, +1! Commented Sep 6, 2012 at 4:56
I'd like to suggest you have a look at a new technology my company created. It's called "VouchSafe" and is available free at http://www.vouchsafe.com
We've created plugins for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and PHPBB, or you can roll your own integration with our APIs for PHP and C#.NET.
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great product :)– AdrianCommented Jan 5, 2012 at 5:33
Depending on your environment you could use Akismet too. It was created to fight blog comment spam.
I'm suggesting you cloudflare services, see http://www.cloudflare.com/features-security
I have the CloudFlare Free plan and it suit my needs perfectly, Fast DNS (geo), Caching and Threats blocking.
Another alternative - http://mollom.com/
Quoted from their site:
Mollom actively protects 51,278 sites from spam currently. Mollom is very accurate, only 5 in 10,000 spam posts were not caught.
