The ability of the CAPTCHA style ‘prove you are a human’ form spam filter to block messages that look somewhat like a real enquiry is difficult. Remote control of web browsers, data matching and scraping from websites, linkedin and google maps makes it much easier to ‘write’ an email or fill in a websie enquiry form with information that is uniquely personalised to the recipient.

So what is the alternative? More cryptic puzzles to prove your humanity? Sure that can work but it’s awful for accessability and could lead to real people trying to make an enquiry giving up and going elsewhere.

An experimental solution we have been testing runs an AI check on any enquiry that gets past the initial ‘are you a human’ check eg Google recaptcha or Cloudflare Turnstile. Imagine if you could copy and paste each web form enquiry into ChatGPT and asked ‘is this spam’?

The AI response is configured to have a pre-defined structure, eg.

{

"is_spam": true,

"spam_score": 95,

"reason": "This submission contains multiple indicators of spam, including suspicious email address, fake phone number, inappropriate\/adult content, and excessive URLs\/promotional links. The message is vague and non-contextual, focusing on what the sender can provide rather than a legitimate inquiry.",

"provider": "Claude",

"model": "claude-3-haiku-20240307",

"tokens_used": 830,

"cost": 0.000292,

"response_time": 1.1881251335144043

}

Which we can then use to update the database tracking which enquiries are spam.

We will continue testing this on our experimental seo sites. If you are finding that the ‘recaptcha’ style filter is not sufficient and would like us to add the ai spam filter to your site and provide feedback on whether the Spam Slayer 5000 has been effective let me know. I don’t think this is necessary for every website and it’s not a replacement for having the recaptcha style humanity check but it demonstrates what is possible. If you manage your own WordPress site and want to try it then the plugin is available on Github here: github.com/abnercalapiz/spam-slayer-5000