Fighting spam in contact forms with reCAPTCHA
To fight the growing amount of spam that arrives us through our contact form on pomfort.com, we decided to use a captcha - distorted text that hopefully can only be read by a human.
reCAPTCHA offers a free webservice, that provides state-of-the-art captchas and various APIs for verifying them.
I chose to use the plain PHP API, as our contact form is a custom made PHP mailer. I followed a random mini-tutorial on the web, as the reCAPTCHA API site for PHP left out an example how to customize the look of the captcha form. All together it took 12 minutes to assemble everything, that’s what I call a straightforward solution.
