Earlier this week, one of GottaQuirk's readers commented that our CAPTCHA system wasn't working properly on IE7 (BTW - this has since been fixed) and it reminded me of how much I hate them (I hate CAPTCHAs - not the readers).
I understand why they exist, and I've sort of come to accept them as a necessary evil, but they still cause me a fair bit of annoyance.
I don't know if my vision is just poor, but I'd estimate that at least once a week I misinterpret a CAPTCHA code.
I've just come across this article over at web log tools collection and it raises a few interesting points.
For me, the big one is,
"Any extra work required to comment is likely to deter some people from commenting at all."
So now, having been reassured that my own anti-captcha view is not a completely irrational one, I'm wondering how many readers of this blog feel the same way.
Does a CAPTCHA ever deter you from posting a comment? Let me know in the comments section.
(Yes, I do realise the irony of asking people to enter a CAPTCHA code to comment on their dislike for said codes)
Muti
Comments
Coda I agree with you on the this text box. I'm not sure why its so small, but it does suck.
Isn't usability a funny thing, something wrong can be sitting right under you nose but it still needs to be pointed out, inevitably through feedback from the nice users :). Shot.
coda, Rob
Hope you find the slightly enlarged comment fields a bit less frustrating.
(Note: you might have to refresh the page to reload the cached stylesheet)
There is an alternative method to CAPTCHAs, but one that has not been tested thoroughly in the industry yet, which was discussed at Internet Storm Center. It involves having a field in the form that you hide with some CSS from the user. A spambot will see the hidden field and fill it in. Then in your code you check to see if the hidden field was filled in and if so then the chances are very good that it was a spambot. We have implemented this method on the SearchStatus comment form and on that same day still we were able to eliminate a big number of spam submissions. Just for the month of December so far (7 days) we were able to block 65 spam submissions with this method.
Thanks for enlarging the box Jean, you're speedy :).
Its really exciting that this hidden field method is working on the SearchStatus form, hopefully it continues to work so we can roll it out to more forms.
I think it's simple really, if it's easy (like coda said) and doesn't break the flow, it doesn't detract from the experience (and thus doesn't deter me).
Yours is fine, mine isn't (but will be fixed soon).
Jean, I like the hidden-field trick, might just implement it myself!
Martin - one thing that I did come across with the hidden field method is that when you try to add this method to an existing form that has been spammed before, you need to change the form's action to something else. This is because spambots tend to cache your form, but if you change the action then they have to re-cache it and with that the hidden field will be cached as well. Also try and name the hidden field to something obvious like "subject" or "comment" so that the bot will think it is something that has to be filled in.
Seth Godin had a great idea for capthcha Images...
Just a quick update regarding this post: You will see that we have removed the CAPTCHA validation on gottaQuirk and there is a post on the method we now use.
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Posted by coda on 2006/12/06