SPAM Is Good, Or CAPTCHA Stinks!
For the last four, or five, years I have been called on many, many times to add CAPTCHA to forms. For those of you who don’t know, CAPTCHA is the image graphic with letters that are obscured so that a machine can’t submit your form. This is a great move if your form is for purchasing something, or logging in, or creating an account. The problem is that this clever little widget is overused. I argue here that adding a CAPTCHA function to your company Contact Form is just a bad idea.
First, as the web site owner you generally don’t have control over the message. Performing a Google search on “funny captcha” will give you some idea of what can happen to even big brands, like Facebook, Coke, and Google. There are web sites dedicated to submitting funny or awkward CAPTCHA messages. The point is, you don’t want to see your brand associated with embarrassing messages that your site users post. Viral marketing can (sometimes) be very bad!
Another reason to stay away from adding a CAPTCHA function to your contact forms is that they can be hard to read and may hinder your potential client from submitting the form at all. If I am providing a service in a competitive market, I do not want a customer that found my contact form to turn away simply because they couldn’t enter the code.
The last reason is probably the most controversial because you installed CAPTCHA to get rid of SPAM in the first place. I say, embrace SPAM, if you are getting submissions to your form that are entered by a spam-bot or automated service, congratulations! You just got free testing, how else can you get random testing and submission of your online form. If you are getting your notifications via email than you know it is working! Now hit the little delete key.
I’m serious, unless you are getting 100 spam emails a day from your form, or there is some integrated tool that is being broken by invalid customer requests, just let it go. You will not turn anyone away from frustration and you won’t be splashed up on a joke web site with some phrase like “u s afu” or much worse.
