Want An Alternative to Captchas? It'll Cost Ya.
Are you a message board enthusiast or top poster on your favorite forum sick of sharing your hard-earned space with spammers? Are you an administrator sick of getting spam on your free forums? Why not pay a service to help eliminate these spammy posts for you? What's being marketed as an alternative to that annoying Captcha, which was designed to force a human to have to be present for each new free mail account creation or for each blog or forum post, is the new service provided by a company by the name of Form Armor.
The service works like this, when someone wants to leave a comment on any of the above mediums, the form is proxied through Form Armor's service where it is put through their propreitary algorithms to check for things such as SQL injection attacks, possible XSS attacks, or just general spamminess. If they fail they are trashed, if they pass, the Form Armor service then passes the comment onto the appropriate forum.
The service will cost between $9 and $29 bucks per month per website. $9 is for the basic set it and forget it service, and the more expensive of the services include a more advanced API with way more control as well as all of the data you could ever want. Worth it? Good question, I guess it depends on your site's visibility, or history. I guess if you run a site that a lot of people are really into, and generates a lot of comment traffic, it may not be a bad thing to have all of the garbage filtered out. Maybe you can request donations from your users to cover the cost. Currently I don't think I would pay for this service, for one because I don't admin a bulletin board, and two I'm not sure people would be motivated to do it. Simply because I'm willing to bet that people don't think it affects them that much, so why pay for an extra service? But then again, people used to think that they didn't need anti-spam for their inboxes either.
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2 comments:
Hi ...phread, thanks for your post about Form Armor. You're right that our service doesn't necessarily make sense for a bulletin board or forum owner, and that's actually not our primary user base.
Most of our clients are companies who rely on Web forms as a way to communicate with customers for some mission-critical part of their business. So things like account registration forms, customer feedback or contact forms, or sales lead generation and the like. (When your sales team spends more time sorting out spam than contacting real leads, it gets costly in a hurry.)
For sites that don't see spam on their forms, we're probably an unnecessary expense. But for sites that do, we're glad to offer a CAPTCHA-free alternative that doesn't put the spam-detection burden on end users.
Thanks again for a thoughtful post!
Larissa Reynolds
Co-founder, Form Armor
Thanks for adding this. I apologize for not mentioning this use of the form. A lot of my research and day to day work with spam was steering me towards the forum mindset. I can certainly agree with the cost associated with spam in a business situation, especially if the online business is centered around form communication. I hope I didn't offend.
...phread
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