Captchas are annoying and only exist to combat spam. I’ve been using a technique for the past year that doesn’t require a captcha and I haven’t received a single piece of spam email.

Here’s how:

1. Create a form and set the form action to # (we dont want spam bots to know where the form is being submitted to).
2. dont use a submit button, instead use an <a href=”#” class=”submit”>Submit</a>
3. Use jquery to trigger the post when the ‘.submit’ link is clicked.

Here’s the jQuery code I use to do the form post:

$('.submit').click(function(){
	  // get the text that the user put into the form
	  var name = $('input#contact-name').val();
	  var email = $('input#contact-email').val();    	
	  var message = $('textarea#contact-message').val();   
          // prepare it for an ajax post 
          var dataString = 'name='+ name + '&email=' + email + '&message=' + message;  
	
          // post the form to the page that hosts your email script
	       $.ajax({  
	       type: "POST",  
	       url: "/a/contact/",  
	       data: dataString,  
	       success: function() {  
	         $('.contactform form').fadeOut();
	         $('.contactform form').html("<h3>Thanks for reaching out!</h3>")  
	         .fadeIn(function() {  
	            $('#formage');  
	          });  
	            }  
	          });  
	        return false;
	    
	});