Who hasn't built a website and had people putting garbage in the "Contact Us" form? The new version of this website, Blogiversity.org, wasn't live two days before I started receiving trash through the "Contact Us" form. I decided it was time to investigate ways to make sure it was a human filling out and submitting the form. As usual, I wanted to find a control that someone else had built and was giving away from free. God bless the internet and programmers who are very willing to share their experiences!

I found a wonderful solution for a CAPTCHA server control for ASP.NET that can be downloaded here. The article does an excellent job of explaining how it works. I had a few concerns about whether I would be able to implement this CAPTCHA control into the Community Server program (CS2007), but I had it up and running well very quickly. All it required was the following steps:

1. Put the WebControlCaptcha.dll file in the bin directory.
2. Add the following to the web.config file under httpHandlers:

   <add verb="GET" path="CaptchaImage.aspx" type="WebControlCaptcha.CaptchaImageHandler, WebControlCaptcha"/>

3. Put a Captcha contol and a Validate Summary control on the webpage. I didn't even have to change any of the default settings.

   <cc1:CaptchaControl ID="CaptchaControl1" runat="server" />
   <asp:ValidationSummary ID="ValidationSummary1" runat="server" />
   

4. Add a reference to the assembly at the top of the webpage.

   <%@ Register Assembly="WebControlCaptcha" Namespace="WebControlCaptcha" TagPrefix="cc1" %>

It works beautifully. I have not had any trash posts since it was installed.