Daniel Chapman:
A virtually invisible spam stopping setup, that is also tough to beat!
a combination of all of the following:
- A honeypot field. An empty field that is hidden from view, and if a bot fills the form and puts something here then it is marked as potential spam
- A field with a value in it that is removed by JS. Bots don't usually have a JS engine, so they won't fire this js. Thus if the field has data in it, it is marked as potential spam
- A timer to check the difference between when the form was requested and submitted. A human takes a few seconds at least to fill out a form, bots take miliseconds. So if the form is submitted in less than 2 or 3 seconds it gets marked as potentially spam
All three of the above tests are put in place to check for spam, then if a particular post gets marked as potentially spam then it gets sent to a second form before submission, which has either a captcha or simple question e.g. 10+2 or "what color is the sky". > Spambots have trouble with multi page forms, and then there is a captcha as the final defense.
Most people will never see the captcha, but ti should stop most if not all spam.
Daniel Chapman: