In mid-April, we made the decision to make it mandatory to use Google’s free reCAPTCHA with Zoey’s newsletter signup forms, effective May 1, 2017. We’ve supported this technology for some time, most notably on customer registration, contact and product review forms, but this is the first it’s been available for newsletter forms. 

Google introduced reCAPTCHA as a way to prevent automated software from abusing your site via fake form submissions, a common practice employed by spammers and malicious hackers. Essentially, before you can submit a form, you must prove that you’re a real human and not a bot. A cool thing about reCAPTCHA is that ever time one is “solved” that efforts is used to annotate images, digitize text, and build machine learning datasets, which helps improve maps, preserve books and make AI better. 

Along with some of the other security tools supported by Zoey, reCAPTCHA is an easy way to keep your online store as secure as possible. It’s also very easy to set up. In fact, we put together a tutorial to help you get started: https://support.zoey.com/docs/prevent-spam-google-recaptcha 

As always, if you’re having trouble getting reCAPTCHA set up on your store, just open a ticket to get help from our Support team.