Comments on: I Hate Captchas

By: Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:43:44 +0000

@Tom – now thats a kitty captcha I can get behind. We may annoy a pressed for time professional trying to get a task done on his dinner break though.

@Graham – I’d highly recommend Akismet for your clients website spam problems. But also I’d rather deal with spam than annoy my clients. I think client and server side form validation is needed.

By: David Webb

David Webb — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:55:23 +0000

I agree they annoy the hell out of me and I avoind using them.

By: Graham

Graham — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:36:39 +0000

I’d love to rid all my sites of captcha. But over the years, no matter how versatile and aggressive I make the form validation. The spammers always find a way to circumvent it and then I have to go back through every single one of my old projects and apply an update.

Captcha is the only thing that I can say, hand on heart, has completely removed spam.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:32:53 +0000

I saw a particularly good (slightly tongue in cheek) alternative to captcha’s that at the time I thought if you removed the p!ss take element would work and be a viable alternative…
…it was a simple question – click on the kitten…four photo’s – three puppy’s, one kitten…

No way a spider or other would be able to pick the kitten

brilliant

By: Benjamin Herrea

Benjamin Herrea — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:58:08 +0000

Hey, i came across your blog on digg and i think it’s awesome!

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:16:10 +0000

Rob, Empire, Brian, welcome to the No Captchas revolution!

By: brian

brian — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:00:32 +0000

I hate them. It costs money and time to get a visitor to your site/business, then we put this in thier way. I surveyed over 300 customers [ we were thinking of implementing] and over 85% said no.

So balance is need to validate with customer experience. I always find them hard to read most times [ no I'm not blind]

By: Empire Elements

Empire Elements — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:31:06 +0000

I think the category in which you have described the good and the bad captchas is very relevant. There have been times when I just had to close the site because the captchas were so wavy that I couldn’t even read and it gave an error again and again saying wrong entry.

Angela

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:18:06 +0000

Captcha’s are a joke. Support your forms with aggressive validation, and then back them with supporting software that detects most spam.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:15:00 +0000

This captcha functionality can surely be met with decent backend form validation, which would not interfere with the users journey.