Spam Protection Without the Surveillance: Introducing Altcha

Every contact form on the internet has the same problem: spam. And for years, the default solution has been Google reCAPTCHA — a tool that protects your form by tracking your visitors. That never sat right with us.

Today we’re rolling out Altcha as the spam protection layer for all forms on Static Site Hosting UK.

What’s Wrong with reCAPTCHA?

Google reCAPTCHA works by analysing visitor behaviour across the web. It sets cookies, loads third-party scripts from Google’s servers, and builds a risk profile of each visitor based on their browsing history. That data flows through US infrastructure and is subject to Google’s privacy policy.

For a platform built around GDPR compliance and privacy-first hosting, that’s a non-starter. It would undermine everything we stand for.

Other popular alternatives like hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile have similar issues — they rely on external services, set cookies, and send visitor data to third-party servers outside your control.

How Altcha Works

Altcha takes a completely different approach. Instead of tracking visitors, it uses proof-of-work — the same concept behind blockchain mining, applied to form submissions.

When a visitor submits your form, their browser is given a small computational challenge. It takes a fraction of a second for a real browser to solve, but makes mass automated submissions computationally expensive for bots. No puzzles to solve, no images to click, no friction for your visitors.

Here’s what makes it different:

• No cookies — nothing is stored in the visitor’s browser
• No tracking — no behavioural profiling or fingerprinting
• No third-party requests — everything runs on our UK infrastructure
• No visitor data leaves your site — the challenge and verification happen entirely server-side
• Open source — Altcha is MIT-licensed and fully auditable

Enabling Altcha on Your Existing Forms

If you’re already using our form processing, enabling Altcha takes just a few seconds:

1. Open the dashboard and navigate to your site
2. Go to Form Settings
3. Toggle Altcha spam protection to enabled
4. Save your settings

That’s it — no code changes needed on your site. The proof-of-work verification is handled entirely on our servers when submissions arrive at your form endpoint. Your existing HTML forms continue to work exactly as before, just with an extra layer of protection.

Setting Up New Forms with Altcha Protection

If you haven’t set up form processing yet, here’s how to get started:

1. Get your form endpoint from the dashboard. Every site gets a unique form URL.

2. Enable Altcha in your form settings (it’s off by default so you can test your form first).

3. Add a standard HTML form to your static site:

<form action="https://forms.statichost.uk/f/your-endpoint-id" method="POST">
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input type="text" id="name" name="name" required>

  <label for="email">Email</label>
  <input type="email" id="email" name="email" required>

  <label for="message">Message</label>
  <textarea id="message" name="message" rows="5" required></textarea>

  <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

4. That’s it. Submissions are forwarded to your email or webhook URL. Spam protection is handled server-side — no JavaScript SDK, no extra scripts, no widget to configure.

Form data is never stored on our servers. It’s verified, forwarded, and discarded.

Why This Matters

Privacy-friendly spam protection isn’t just a nice-to-have. Under GDPR, every third-party service that processes visitor data needs to be disclosed in your privacy policy and may require consent. By keeping everything self-hosted and cookie-free, your forms stay compliant without additional cookie banners or consent flows.

Your visitors get a better experience. You get fewer spam submissions. And nobody’s data gets sent to Google.

Learn More

• Altcha — the open-source project behind the proof-of-work captcha
• Features — full list of what’s included with Static Site Hosting UK
• Get started free — deploy your first site in minutes