Our customers constantly ask us this question, "why did you use that image on the form where users have to guess the characters?".

In this case, we are talking about Captcha.

The captcha is a test used in computing fields to determine whether the user is a human or a computer (Wikipedia). But, but how does that relate to a web page ?, let's first explain one of the possible attacks that can be done to a web site.

• The problem (stage 1): UAn automated program or ¨bot¨ finds a contact form within your web page that does not have captcha enabled and begins to fill your inbox with unwanted email or ¨spam¨, Emails asking for a Bank password, offers to buy viagra, sending advertising of unreliable companies, etc. Until now the problem can be solved sending all this junk mail to spam folder. However, if you do not solve the problem it can go to stage 2.
• The server that hosts your website has a heavy workload sending so many emails in a short period of time, therefore your website and all the websites within the same server begins to get slow, affecting your position on search engines and usability of the site, however, if you do not solve the problem you can reach stage 3.
• The problem (stage 3): Blacklist servers detect the ip address of the server hosting your website, listing it on the "blacklist" as a spam sender ip address. Now your website is slow, or in the worst case, it can not be loaded at all, and since the ip address is in the "blacklist" it will no longer even appear in the search engines.

In this way, a problem that began as a simple bot trying to consume the resources of your server to send spam can lead you to tear down your website and list your ip address on the "blacklist", causing permanent damage to your corporate image on the web.

At this point we all agree that security policies are required to protect our website. However, even if we solve the security problem with the CAPTCHA, asking the user to enter an additional step to complete the contact form can lead to the user leaving the website because it seems very complicated to get in touch.

For this, we are pleased to present the new Captcha Google, the reCAPTCHA, which allows, just click on "I am not a robot" to validate that the user is not a robot. So there is no pretext not to use a reCAPTCHA on our website.

In Proideasweb we are concerned about the security of your website and your corporate image on the internet, contact us if you require more information.