Improved Spam Protection for Contact Forms
The Sliced Bread mail form has been updated with a brand new feature to prevent the form used to send you spam! A user must now enter a randomly generated four digit code before the email can be sent.
This will prevent robots from using your online contact form to send you spam and unwanted messages.
This option will be automatically included in all new installations of Sliced Bread, however due to the complexity of the solution it is only being installed on older web sites running sliced bread where requested.
You can see the solution in operation on the Sliced Bread CMS Website on both the Online Demonstration Request page and the Online Contact Form.
Whilst the solution will not stop humans from using the form to send you spam, most individual spam sent using contact forms is done by automated scripts and not humans.
This solution is known as Captcha and is highly effective in preventing automated spam:
Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. A CAPTCHA involves one computer (a server) which asks a user to complete a test. While the computer is able to generate and grade the test, it is not able to solve the test on its own. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human.
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
