Fewer Junk Form Submissions

Some spam gets past every captcha. A bot fills in your contact form with a made-up name and a message of random letters, and you get an email like this:

• name: Rauhq Kyrfnrr
• message: JHSdVXtUYfhYUtbqKwwUF

Altcha, our captcha, makes every submission cost the sender a little computing time. That stops a script firing off thousands at once. It doesn’t stop a bot that drives a real browser and is happy to wait.

What changed

Since 20 October we also look at what a submission says. Bot spam like this has habits that real people rarely share, and when a submission shows them together, we drop it. It shows as Spam under Recent Activity on your form, and the sender sees your usual thank-you page, so the bot can’t tell it was caught.

We’re not publishing the exact signs, because the people who write these bots would read them too.

Could a real enquiry be caught?

It could, which is why one sign is never enough. A submission is dropped only when it shows more than one, and a message written by a person rarely shows even one.

What to do

Nothing. The check runs on our side, for every form on every plan. If an enquiry you were expecting goes missing, or junk keeps getting through, email us at and we’ll look at it with you.