A common abuse is with web forms. Let's say you have a form on your web site that posts comments to a discussion board or support forum. If the form is unprotected you'll get robots (small programs that hackers write) that will automatically post information to your form that will advertise their product. An effective way to combat this type of abuse is to use an image that displays text the user must enter in order to successfully post to that form - this ensures that a real human being is posting and not an automated robot. A simple demonstration is below - give it a shot, just enter the numbers and letters displayed in the image and you'll be notified if your entry was correct.

Validation Code: (Please enter the cAsE sensitive validation text displayed above)

One way to combat this is to use a form that allows users to email you by completing the form. There are several drawbacks to this method. First, it opens your form to abuse as described above. Second, most email programs will save a copy of sent messages so that the user can see a history of messages he has sent, and follow up when necessary. If they are forced to fill out a form the user doesn't have a copy of the message they've sent.

We employ a variety of techniques to combat this type of abuse, that will allow you to display your email address as a clickable link on a web page, and prevent crawlers from detecting and harvesting your email. One of these methods is described below.

The email link above is written to the web page in JavaScript, there is no way for a crawler to harvest this address because the source code does not contain any '@' symbol. This is only one example of several methods we use to combat the ongoing problem of spam on the Internet.