Spammers use scripts that crawl the web and fill out forms, hoping the form will result in someone receiving their spam message.

This causes problems for business owners who can become inundated with spam through their contact/enquiry, order and booking forms, making it difficult and time-consuming to sort through and find the legitimate submissions.

Two effective ways to prevent, or minimise, this type of spamare:

• Have your web developer modify the form to discard any form submissions that contain more than three URLs (which would never occur in ordinary usage)
• Have your web developer install a CAPTCHA (part of the form that requires the user to do something, such as identify a word in an image, that a computer script cannot do)

The former is non-intrusive, and might suffice for many websites. The latter is intrusive, in that it requires your visitor to do more work, but might be worth it in order to reduce workload in sifting through countless spam form submissions.