Say Hello To Improved Conversion With Honeypots!

Today marks the beginning of a new era of improved interaction here at Adaptistration thanks to saying so-long to Captcha, that box you find at the end of comment forms and pretty much anywhere were websites are trying to block spammers. Unfortunately, they also do a pretty good job at blocking users, ticket buyers, and patrons looking for info; fortunately, there are options.

Since the beginning of the year, the most common type of Captcha, the distorted text challenge, have become an increasing pain in the tuchus. And in the end, it became tiresome to punish website visitors with these headache inducing challenge tests just to keep low-life spammers out of the system; but there is a solution.

And that answer comes in the form of the Honeypot Spam Trap (don’t you love geek nomenclature?). Honeypots are nothing new but they’ve become much more effective as of late, enough so that I’ve been testing them at a number of sites, the latest of which is here at Adaptistration.

Simply put, Honeypots insert form fields that are hidden to humans but spam bots think they are real. So if the system sees that the Honeypot field has been completed, it must be from a low-life spammer and it either quarantines the message for review or shreds into digital infinity.

The best part is it means website users are relieved from the hassle of deciphering twisted letters, doing math, or remembering the capital of France (it’s Paris). All they have to do is complete regular form fields and click the submit button.

I’ve been deploying Honeypots at a number of Venture user sites and other website projects and the success rates are equal to or better than Captcha options so the next step is to roll it out here at a blog that garners far more comment oriented traffic than a typical arts org website. It’s been in place for a few days now and so far, so good.

Depending on what sort of platform your site is running, a Honeypot may be just the thing to help eliminate conversion barriers like Captcha. I’ll be happy to share whatever I’ve learned, just get in touch via submitting a Captcha-free comment below or using the Captcha-free contact form.