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Captcha with Flash Forms
If you are using Internet for your daily needs you have probably seen Captcha many times, you might just not know it. If you are familiar with the term you can skip the explanation below, otherwise read on.
Note: According to Wikipedia “captcha (an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart") is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human”.
Captcha is a small image with randomly generated text placed on a web form next to a designated text field. To submit the form user must type the text seen on the image into that text field. Thoroughly written server-side code will accept the submitted data only if the text has been entered correctly. To make it even more “spammer-proof” the verification text can be slightly scrambled, rotated and/or appear over a patterned background.
Since no modern software can (reliably) read text from images, Captchas make it really hard (if not impossible) to automate form submission procedure, thus protecting web sites against unfriendly actions, like web form spam or brute force attacks.
Ultimately, Captcha can be very useful on your HTML form, whether it’s a trivial “Contact us” page or a log-in screen to a web application processing sensitive data.
Flash forms are not as easy of a prey for the bad guys as they can’t be detected by crawlers or parsed as text.
Nevertheless, you can still benefit great deal from utilizing Captcha on your Flash forms. Why?
The answer, although simple, might not be obvious:
Any form whether it’s been designed in Flash or HTML needs a server-side script to process the submitted data. It is that script – not the form itself, of course, that requires protection from the automated submissions.
Alex July
Alex July is a Vancouver-based (Canada, British Columbia) Web Developer/ Graphic Artist who has an extensive experience in both creative realms.
He is also a host of Linecraft.com where he is showcasing his skills and sharing experience with the developers community. For the past 3 years Alex has been focusing on the development of Rich Internet Applications using Macromedia Flash technology.
When away from the computer Alex is practicing Martial Arts, playing guitar and enjoying time with his wonderful family.