I never consider myself one, but today I have a feeling that it's quite apt to describe the intensity of my concentration in finding an easy and secure way to prevent the website that I'm tinkering from spam.

I've been a victim of comment spam too. All of a sudden I got a message from Rodrigo or Sara inviting me to try Viagra. Usually the reason for spam is to create links to increase page rank of that site. I didn't give a damn then but now that I knew better, I decided to make life more difficult for "email harvesters" or engine bots.

As everybody from Earth knows, Google is a very nifty tool to find everything you need (except for missing car keys, but eventually Google will get into that). I want two links protected: first, the mailto: link. The usual format uses the a href code, so when you click riskinnet, you're mailer (i.e, Outlook) will pop up and you can start sending email to the mailto: address. Second, is a web content form. I have created a from where non-malicious people who have legit queries or comments can directly type away their woes and when they click the submit button, it will directly send to the specified email address.

So I started with Google using keywords such as web content anti spam, mailto: prevent spam, etc and got more than 100 million results. I found several websites giving advice to newbies like me.

I decided to try two easy suggestions from those very helpful sites. First strategy is the use of a graphic @. You have to create an @ in Photoshop or in any image editing tool , save it in your server, and insert the image url in your address, like this one: riskinnet < img src = "/ images / @.gif" align = absbottom border = 0 alt= @ > riskinnet.com. The downside is that your email add won't be clickable, instead visitors need to type in your email address manually. The second defense is the use of ASCII characters in your email address. Letters and symbols in the email address would be converted to ASCII and then hopefully, the user's browser would convert those characters back to readable letters, but it won't be easy for spammers using automatic web crawlers. Related to this, I found a site which encodes your regular email address into a series of numbers and symbols plus the mailto: link and all you have to do is copy and paste in your a href code.

I still have to find among those 100 million results something that would help me protect the web form I created. I actually found one which uses CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It has a web verification image for the user to type first before the form gets submitted. But my problem is I need to create an output page with meta html redirect in my form processing script. It's doable for a newbie but I'm quite exhausted at the moment.

If you want to put a stop on spam, you might want to visit these websites:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/stop-comment-spam
http://www.ohlone.cc.ca.us/org/webcenter/emailencoder.html
http://www.protectwebform.com/.

Good luck ;)