Alexei@Nitobi

Phil Haack proposed a very interesting method of stopping comment spam on bulletin boards, forums, and blogs. Hey calls this technique the ‘Honeypot’ Captcha.

The basic idea is that comment spam doesn’t generally execute JavaScript and doesn’t evaluate CSS. They also love form fields. So.. the idea is that you put a hidden form field in your comment form, and anybody that fills it out (ie spam bots), throw out that comment.

Its a smart idea. Some commentors pointed out that this might throw off people with screen readers who will have those fields read aloud. I’m not a JAWS expert but I have spent some time with it, and I don’t think it will read hidden fields.. Its fairly CSS aware. Other screen readers may get tripped up on this – not sure. I suppose you could help those people by putting a hidden label right next to the field: “If you are on a screen reader such as Windows Eyes, please disregard the following form field:”

I suppose its also a matter of time before spammers get wise to this somehow too. BTW If you are an ASP.NET user, he’s got some sample code on his site here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under User Interface, web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.