Web Form Security - Image Verification

If your web site contact form does not include some type of image verification, it is likely your form will be abused by spammers and the like.

Because most spam submitted through web site forms are submitted by spambots, or automated scripts, some sort of human verification is necessary.

There are two main types of human verification:

1. Upon submitting the form, the person who submitted must check their email and approve the submission via an email link.

• This is great for a complicated order style system, but requires significantly more effort to set up and maintain than a simple image verification system. Knowledge of MySQL is necessary.

Human verification, also know as CAPTCHA [learn more] is a far simpler system to set up, and can be added to most existing order forms without a great deal of effort. Below are a few links to CAPTCHA related tutorials:

• reCAPTHCA
• Best Web Forms
• Shout it Out Captcha
• A PHP Class for Captcha
  
• Captcha image verification
• PHP Form image verification
• Secure PHP Form Mailer Script (recommended)
• Protectwebform . com
• Captchas . net