Secret usage on Symfony2's parameters.ini

Question

I am currently working on a enterprise project using Symfony2.

Our project has some different forms used to contact the clients with their provider in different kind of areas, and we need to secure them from spamming.

I (we) heard that the secret alphanumeric code set in parameters.ini does the job (this one that looks like 7f820ab290c78aacb2...), but we want to ensure it because we want to avoid the use of CAPTCHA codes and those histories that make some users go mad with the characters they have to type.

So the question is, is it real that the SECRET code protects the form from spammers?

If not, anyone knows about securing forms without using visual validation systems like Captcha?

Answer 1

This is for the generation of the csrf-token. It does not really prevents spam, but makes it harder to automatic submit forms by a bot.