CAPTCHA - Use One To Protect Your Email List

From the Wikipedia: CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test to determine whether the user is human. The process involves one computer asking a registrant to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human.

Translation: A CAPTCHA is made up of those distorted letters and numbers that a registrant needs to type into a field like the one to the right. Therefore, anyone who is registering on a form and completes the sign up with the CAPTCHA is a human who wants to register for something and not an automated script or "bot".

Why they’re good: If you build your email marketing list and use a newsletter sign-up form like the one VerticalResponse provides for free, you might get a fake sign up generated by these "bots". Now you're faced with having to spend more of your time cleaning out your lists because you don't want to miscount these bogus registrations as potential subscribers.

That’s the reason why a CAPTCHA works really well. You won’t even add these computer-generated registrants to your list so your list should be automatically cleaner in the long run.

VerticalResponse has just given our users the option to include a CAPTCHA with their opt-in form, again FREE.

If you want to get your own opt-in form, watch this video and make sure you click Use CAPTCHA Verification.

If you already have an opt-in form and want to include a CAPTCHA:

1)    Click on any of your lists.
2)    At the top of the next screen click on Opt-in Forms
3)    Click on the name of the form you want to include a CAPTCHA with
4)    Go into the Design Your Form tab
5)    Check Use CAPTCHA Verification
6)    Go to the Publish tab
7)    Replace all the HTML with new one we provide you on your website or click on Publish to TypePad and it will automatically replace your current one.

Oh, CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Now go get yourself a CAPTCHA!

Comments

[gamesgeeks]

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