alternatives to captcha

[zengoth]

I am not a developer, but the website I designed for a client has a form which is getting lots of spam. Client mentioned how ugly the captcha boxes are (and I can understand that). Is there an alternative to captcha that I can offer him?

Remember, I am not a programmer, so please be kind. I am good at design, html and css - and that's about it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[AE7]

Ok. I had this problem with a site one time. I ended up making the form viewer jump through a hoop with some JavaScript I wrote. The user had to validate by solving a simple maze with their mouse. See: jQuery.

If you're looking to build something custom. For starters, a simple HTML label that shows a random number generated by PHP will work. If you want to get more sophisticated, use the GD library within PHP to take that random number and turn it into an image to be displayed. The user takes the number shown and enters it into a text box.

I try to use reCaptcha as much as possible. Use CSS to theme it to the page that you are working with.
http://recaptcha.net/

You'll be fine with PHP, but look into using JavaScript to do some intensive validation on the forms.