Contact Form Spam

When we recently redesigned the Sumy Designs website, we purposely went with an all HTML/CSS site instead of a more complex content management system. Our old site was a Joomla site, and I liked it quite well, but I felt like a lot of the features were not really needed for this kind of site. What I really needed was a way to get our information and rates out there, show our portfolio, and allow people to contact us. Using an all HTML/CSS site had the added plus of being able to have 100% search engine optimization with SEO URLs, excellently formed page titles, and good meta data.

The one drawback, though, is that we’ve had a terrible time with contact form spam! The robots have found our site, and we are getting hit daily, repeatedly.

Originally, I made the fields all required, so that anyone skipping a field would not be able to submit. But the ‘bots got too smart for that, and just started filling in all the fields.

I know there are options such as Captcha out there. But this isn’t friendly to visually impaired users and also, it doesn’t look good. So I sought out alternatives.

The one I ended up going with was adding a quick little field that asks users to answer a simple question, such as “What is 1+1?” If they answer anything but 2, then they can’t submit.

I just implemented it today, so I will report back later with my success or failure. See my contact form here. See the instructions here.