Spam stinks. But the solution never be as bad as the problem. Captcha, one of the most widespread methods of letting humans in and keeping spambots out, can get annoying and even downright confusing, from words you can’t read to mysterious symbols you’ve never seen to images that won’t even load. Click here for an amusing compilation of some very bad examples.

Here are our two favorite alternative methods for fighting spam.

Easy Tasks

It isn’t exactly rocket science: simply create a very easy task for a user to complete. As long as it requires a human to understand the instructions, you’ve got a perfect spam filter.

For example, on a registration form, you can include a checkbox that is checked by default. Next to it, give the instruction: “Uncheck the box if you are a human.” Then mark any submissions in which the box has remained checked and let your email cull them out.

To accomplish this, include the following code in any HTML form:

<input type="Checkbox" name="spam_detector_2" value="!!!SPAM!!!" checked="checked" /> Uncheck the box if you are a human

If you receive website form submissions as emails (as most web hosts do), configure your email client to move emails marked !!!SPAM!!! to a separate folder or to delete them. Bye-bye, spam.

Hidden Fields

Here’s a great example of using those Homo Sapien smarts to outwit the bots. Spambots tend to enter information into any form field whether it is visible to the website’s human visitors or not. To exploit the evil computer’s weakness, a developer can use CSS to hide a particular field from view and add a bit of code so the system checks the hidden field for data. Any submission that has added information to the field is most likely spam, while human entries will leave the field blank.

Here’s the code, which is best added at the top of the form:

<input class="invisible" type="Text" name="spam_detector_3" />

<style type="text/css">
<!--
input.invisible {display:none;}
-->
</style>

Analyze the form data, redirect the offending submissions to the spam folder or to the trash, sit back, and revel in your victory over the machines.

Related links:

Free WordPress CAPTCHA plugin.

Wikipedia says that pinging is:

an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.

If you log in to your WP admin panel and click Settings > Writing on the left hand side menu, at the bottom of the resulting page you will see a field called “Update Services.” By default, all WP sites use http://rpc.pingomatic.com/, which you should see listed in the box. However, there are many pinging websites to choose from, and some may suit your needs better than others. A simple Google search yields dozens, if not hundreds of options.

Don’t get carried away

While you undoubtedly want as many content aggregators to know about your site so you can bring lots of visitors, you’ll also need to be careful not to get carried away: Ping one source more than three times and you could get marked as a ping spammer. Hence, it’s often best to let one pinging site do its work rather than try to incorporate several at once. As it happens, Pingomatic, the WP default, is an excellent service.

Still curious about what’s out there? A programmer and designer named Aaron Boundy recently did some fastidious research and provided a definitive list of ping servers for 2010/2011. Read his full list here.

Among the best out there:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://blogpeople.net/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com
http://www.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://sindice.com/xmlrpc/api

Note: If you’re on a WordPress Multisite network, pinging services are deactivated by default. To turn them back on, you’ll need this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/activate-update-services/

Like a lot of the other tips and tricks we write about, YouTube tweaks are incredibly simple to implement, with most requiring only tiny bits of text called query string parameters. These will come in handy—we promise.

First things first

In every YouTube URL, there is a unique combination of characters that make up the video’s ID. In a simple URL, this is everything that comes after ‘watch?v=’. In the following example, the video ID is FUqjgHNcafU.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUqjgHNcafU

We’re going to refer to this part of the URL as Video_ID from now on.

Most parameters that are added to a URL begin with an ampersand (&) followed by a few letters or words. The most common one is &feature=related, which indicates that a video was reached by clicking ‘Related Video’. The resulting URL looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Video_ID&feature=related

HD video format

Not every YouTube video offers HD formatting, but when you link to one that does, you have the option of sending a user directly to that 720p version. Use the &hd=1 parameter, adding it to the end of the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Video_ID&hd=1

Skip to a specific spot in the video

If you’d like to send your visitors to a specific spot rather than start them at the beginning, add #t=2m30s, where the number in front of the ‘m’ represents minutes and the number in front of the ‘s’ represents seconds. In the following example, the visitor would begin watching at the 2:30 mark in the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Video_ID#t=2m30s

Launch the video in a full size player

To load a large player that fills the entire browser window, replace the ‘?’ and ‘=’ in the URL with ‘/’ and delete ‘watch’.

http://www.youtube.com/v/Video_ID

Prevent the video from autoplaying

A frustration for many users, Autoplay has no unique parameter that allows users to turn it off. However, when you launch the full size player, as in the previous example, autoplay is turned off by default. Use this as a workaround to get rid of Autoplay, or opt for any of a number of browser plugins that add this functionality.

To turn autoplay back on while in the full size player, add &autoplay=1 to the end of the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/v/Video_ID&autoplay=1

Loop the video

Looping is another parameter that requires a slight workaround. While a number of websites offer this functionality—which they usually deliver by simply changing the domain name—you don’t need them. Simply use the full size player again, adding &loop=1 to the end of the URL.

http://www.youtube.com/v/Video_ID&loop=1

According to .OrgSource, a web strategy and e-communications consulting firm, web readers absorb about 28% of the words on an average page visit—and that’s being generous (the real figure may closer to 20%). About 79% of website visitors tend to scan rather than read an entire article.

It takes longer to read online content too: Most folks read about 25% slower on a screen than on paper. If you create a page with long, daunting paragraphs or hide the most meaningful points deep inside them, your readers be reaching for the “Back” button quicker than you can say “Wait, don’t leave!”

2. Use self-explanatory, clearly marked blocks of text

Short headlines (8 words or less) are your friend. Subheadings are your friend. Bulleted lists are your friend. Short paragraphs (30-50 words) are your friend. Make your content easy to scan so that visitors notice it’s worthwhile. Then they’ll the time to read it more thoroughly.

3. Write in inverted pyramid style

In journalism, reporters learn to give the most important facts first, then progressively disclose detail. It’s called inverted pyramid style, and it’s extremely useful for web writing. After all, your readers may only take in the first paragraph of an article before moving on to another page.

According to a 2006 study by Jakob Nielsen, web readers browse a page in an F-shaped pattern in which the top two paragraphs receive the most attention while the rest of the content is mostly skimmed or ignored altogether. Put the most important stuff at the beginning of the article where they’re most likely to see it.

For more quick and dirty web writing tips, see this excellent (and short!) article by MarketingProfs.com.