Comments on: I Hate Captchas

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.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:01:33 +0000

If we did not put obstacles in the way the fact is you WOULD be bombarded with comment spam — simple as.

Using wordpress for example, how much crap do you get (if you don’t moderate all comments that is). Even with askimet on spam does make it through the net. *Shameless plug* some catpchas are better than others though IMO, for instance just a question (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-stopper/) rather than a random string.

Admittedly some sites take it too far though, for instance a download site i visted not so long ago asked me to count how many dogs were pictures, but it was impossible because the pictures of dogs had poorly drawn cats next to them so I could not tell the difference!

I also do hate the word catpcha because I can never remember the spelling.