Tod1d's Thought Process

My Google Mail box is overflowing with submissions from the contact form on this site. The form has been useful for people to contact me directly without having to leave a comment on my blog.

A few months ago spam began trickling in, three to five emails at a time. Now I average about thirty a day. Possibly worse than the amount of spam, is the lack of quality spam. Are these guys even trying anymore? Here is an example:

Insurance
Insurance
Insurance

Imagine that the above are all hyperlinks to sites somewhere in Russia and you get the picture.

To combat this onslaught of unwanted solicitation from Russian insurance salesmen, I have decided to add a low-tech version of CAPTCHA to the contact form on this site. It is a blatant rip-off of Jeff Attwood's, but I figure if it is good enough for him...

Update

Apparantely my solution was overly low-tech. The validation I was using was via client-side Javascript only. The bots that the Russians are using ignore Javascript, so they were still hassling me.

Last night I added server side validation to the ASP script that processes the form. I am happy to report that I have not received a single form submission that contained SPAM. Yeah baby!