Forms are everywhere online. They give us the ability to take what would otherwise be a flat page of text and images and start sending information to the person or people behind the webpage. It’s then that the page becomes a tool rather than just a reference. WebSite Tonight has always offered forms available in all sorts of customizable shapes and formats to make your site more dynamic and useful, but what happens when your site attracts the attention of less than scrupulous characters? Wait a minute… is THAT where all that spam is coming from via my website’s form?

As a long time user of WebSite Tonight (and someone who hates spam as much as you) I am glad to present our new CAPTCHA feature to the Website Tonight forms. As a bit of background, CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and you can see them anywhere from your MySpace login to Go Daddy’s password reset. CAPTCHA’S are usually an image of a series of characters or a word, hidden inside of a background of squiggles or slashes that prevent image recognition software from reading it. The form user is requested to type in the characters as they see them and if they’re correct, the form is submitted.

WebSite Tonight’s CAPTCHA features dynamically generates images using randomly created number patterns, which means that no matter how many times a spambot may try to pick up a pattern and get around the form protection, they’ll never find it as there is no set list. Every new CAPTCHA is a new pattern specifically made to be easily readable for your human users and difficult for anything else.

This feature is available for all Deluxe and Premium users as of right now, and if you’re already familiar with the WebSite Tonight form editor, you’ll be pleased to find out that you can add it and move it around in exactly the same fashion you would with any other form field. Republish your project and there you are, spam-free living.

If it’s online, and you want to keep the bots out, there are few ways better than CAPTCHA to do so. We have been looking forward to offering this feature for a while and look forward to your feedback on it. As always, let us know what you think!