Joomla Forms – Preview – Combating Spam Forms

Well I got a little discouraged lately, hence I forgot to blog – but now lets see if I can get excited to blog about the upcoming feature of Joomla Forms again

Spam – The fight is on!

As you can see in my blog, I do not believe that CAPTCHA is the best way to tackle spam form submissions.  Today I received the permission I granted to integrate a great new service into Joomla Forms.

Introducing the Mollom project – founded by of the developers of Drupal!

Mollom helps you keep your site clean and on topic by automatically blocking comment form spam, contact form spam and fake user accounts. We use a novel filtering technique based on the combination of content analysis and CAPTCHA challenges.

Woaah I hear you cry – CAPTCHA, you said no captcha!!!

Well Mollom is slightly different – it only asks the submitter to complete a CAPTCHA if it is unsure if your form submission is spam or not – most form submitters will NEVER get asked to complete a CAPTCHA as their form submission is (hopefully) not spam!

This is more than a half way house – infact its a great system that is like Akismet (the leader at the moment) which combines a service model that provides filtering by their rules – with the backup of CAPTCHA should it be unsure that the form submission is spam.

In a real world situation users would never be asked to complete the CAPTCHA

Just another loop for spammers of Joomla Forms to jump through

(This feature requires you to sign up for a free account at the mollom site and then provide Joomla Forms with the API Keys provided by Mollom.  This service is NOT designed for secure forms as data will be transfered in unencrypted form to the Mollom API.  Mollom is integrated with Joomla Forms by kind permissions of the lead developer and is grateful to this developer for the PHP5 API. This feature can be turned on/off in Joomla Forms.)