Web forms and spam
Do you receive unhelpful spam from your web forms? While there have been tools available that attempt to thwart the automated form submission robots that are responsible for this, such options have introduced barriers to visitors that rely on assistive technology. For this reason we had not allowed for the use of reCAPTCHA (a popular service to stop form spam) on our web forms.
A more accessible version of reCAPTCHA is now available for our web forms that does not have this shortcoming. Version 3 of reCAPTCHA relies on unobtrusive “scoring” to identify spam, and does not require any action on the part of the form submitter. If you are interested in adding anti-spam technology to your web form(s), please contact us at um.weboffice@maine.edu and we can help.
A note about web form names
By default web forms submit notifications to an email address owned by Digital Communications. Because of this, we receive many web form notifications, spam included. Giving your web form a unique name will help us identify the source of these notifications, and allow us to proactively add the new anti-spam feature. If you have web forms named “contact us,” “contact,” “subscribe” or another general name, consider changing your web form name to be more specific to your website, for example “Contact UMaine Digital Communications.” This may be helpful to you as well, if you are the recipient of several different web forms.
Questions about your forms?
Contact us at um.weboffice@maine.edu, and we will be happy to review your web forms for best practices.