Let’s face it – CAPTCHAs suck. Users are scared away by them and we as developers feel guilty about implementing them.
Worst of all, there are bots these days that can read them and spammers even go so far as to hire people from the third world to crack CAPTCHAs (yes, really).
Now, what if there was a painless alternative? Well, there is – my awesomesauce AntiSpam class.
Features
- Bans – making sure bots that fail don’t get a second chance. Unless you want them too, of course. What happens when a ban is triggered is left up to you. Bans can be done either through mySQL or a txt file on your server.
- Easy to use – you create your form simply by typing in your form HTML code. No need to use abstract functions, just type it all in and my class figures everything out.
- Style forms naturally – you can style your forms however you want painlessly. The class doesn’t get in your way.
- Doesn’t get in the way – unlike with CAPTCHAs, humans don’t get penalised for no reason. A human user sees it all as just a form. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.
- ID friendly – after reading how this works, you’d think that you can’t use IDs in your form elements, but don’t worry. Adding javascript-friendly and W3 validation-friendly IDs is very easy.
- Developer-friendly – the package comes as 2 versions. One of them is the “developer” version, full of comments in case you’d like to modify the class.
It works by taking your form and multiplying it, making it almost impossible for someone who isn’t a real person from getting through. Using custom-generated external stylesheets, which most bots don’t even load because of bandwidth concerns, and some CSS trickery, it thwarts bots while making it seamless for your visitors.
For a normal spambot, it’s next to impossible to crack. And even for a bot specifically designed to recognize multiple forms, at the default settings it has a mere 2% chance of guessing its way through. And if the bot fails, it gets no second chance – this class comes complete with a banning system that works either through mySQL or via a txt file, that lets you choose what happens when a banned IP tries to access your form, giving you complete control over your site.
Tested and successfully working on:
- IE 6 +
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Opera
- Safari
- iOS Safari
- Android Browser
Please note that there is no guarantee that this will stop all spambots. Just as there are bots out there specifically designed to crack CAPTCHAs, there are bots designed to counteract this type of spam prevention. However, this class uses many techniques to try and obstruct those bots, and its techniques are more than enough to protect against regular bots.