Filtering spam form submissions

[36degrees]

Also known as: captcha, recaptcha, honeypot, rate limiting, bot detection

What

A consistent approach to filtering out spam form submissions across GOV.UK - especially if the approach requires some interaction from the user (e.g. clicking a checkbox, performing a task)

Why

We discourage users from using traditional CAPTCHAs in the Service Manual but do not offer any alternative other than linking to some high-level concepts (rate limiting, honeypots)

Services need to be run efficiently, and dealing with spam form submissions adds an overhead to the running of a service - leading to longer response times, higher costs to the taxpayer.

This is not a trivial problem, but is the sort of thing we should be looking to solve once rather than every service team having to solve it themselves.