That is a problem that most people involved with any kind of website might face one day.

Spam coming through your business inquiry form.

That can be specially frustrating at quiet times when you are praying for new business and all you get is countless viagra offers.

But fear not, there is a way of cutting it down by some good 99%, and I am not talking about annoying captchas. The secret is behind the type of validation you are using on your form, and a very easy to use HTML/CSS technique, sure it is nice to have a funky JavaScript validation  but remember that can be disabled on the browser, and never than less spammers don’t even use browsers to attack you so you need to go back to basics and validate your form at server side, that’s right PHP them, or whatever other server side language you dig.

I have chosen PHP, and the validation alone has reduced my spam rate by more than 70% but I was still getting rubbish into my system, that is when i came across another web design site where they mentioned something that really interested me by it’s simplicity, they said a big internet company managed to cut down spammers by creating fake HTML fields into the form, a field that is normally used by spammers such as “subject”, i am not talking about a hidden field, but a field that is editable by the user but is kept away from the human eye using CSS, very clever huh?

Well yes, since using the PHP validation and this technique i have only received one commercial communication but the loser had to spend time typing on each one of my fields (I’ve checked that), no more Viagra, drugs and all that fake dating sites.

You can use any fields you want but when using this technique beware with fields that can be filled by the Google toolbar such as name, telephone etc.

Hope it is helpful to you.

Wagner