Earlier this week Google acquired reCAPTCHA (16th September 2009).

CAPTCHA tests are those squiggly letters that are displayed when you are buying items online, or accessing some sites.  Already more than 100,000 sites use reCAPTCHA, but Google is more likely interested in reCAPTCHAs experience in OCR (Optical Character Recognition)  -  a process “that converts scanned images into plain text [and] powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.”  For more on Google’s once again contentious book-scanning programme see this article by Reuters.

Salesforce uses reCAPTCHA, and you may have already experienced it when accessing some Salesforce resources.  There’s also a brief introduction to understanding CAPTCHA on the Salesforce developerforce site, some of which is copied from the reCAPTCHA site.

So, what’s all this to do with salesforce leads?

Salesforce allow you to very easily generate the code for capturing lead contact data entered into a web site form.  The so called Web2Lead functionality.  But there’s a problem with the default code.  Essentially your organisation Id is exposed and unscrupulous coders could easily use you Web2Lead details to propagate SPAM (see the Salesforce Ideas entry).

reCAPTCHA to the rescue!  As a proof of concept I have created a web page to capture lead details.  I’ve extended it to include extra custom fields (e.g. a picklist: prefered method of contact), immediate (a fully configurable) validation of the data entered, and reCAPTCHA to prove your human …

You can test all this functionality on my other site: http://www.bdgreen.it …

Note: The web page also makes use of the another reCAPTCHA function that enable you to obscure (again to prevent SPAMMERS) your contact email address.