Stop spam without captcha

unreal picture unreal · Sep 19, 2010 · Viewed 21.7k times · Source

I want to stop spammers from using my site. But I find CAPTCHA very annoying. I am not just talking about the "type the text" type, but anything that requires the user to waste his time to prove himself human.

What can I do here?

Answer

vassilis picture vassilis · Sep 19, 2010

Requiring Javascript to post data blocks a fair amount of spam bots while not interfering with most users.

You can also use an nifty trick:

<input type="text" id="not_human" name="name" />
<input type="text" name="actual_name" />
<style>
   #not_human { display: none }
</style>

Most bots will populate the first field, so you can block them.