Part of my work as a freelancer is search engine optimisation. This coupled with running my own business, I spend a significant amount of time submitting to directories, classifieds, article websites etc. It means repeatedly filling in forms with various pieces of information which generally bores me to death at the best of times.
One of the most bizarre tasks that I am sometimes faced with however, is the CAPTCHA field aimed to keep out spam submissions. I understand their purpose and I fully expect to have to indulge the site owner in proving that I am in fact Human. The problem I have with the little f**kers is that sometimes they are incredibly hard to read and it can take 2 or 3 attempts before I get the bloody thing right! I’m not referring to the newer, more sophisticated ones that read the letters out to you, or allow you to refresh; I’m talking about the older ones with distorted lettering. Why does it even need to be distorted? As long as there’s no ALT tag telling the spam bot what the code is (that’d be funny) it could actually be as clear as day – this way Humans will understand it immediately but the spam bot won’t.
</rant>
Stewart Boutcher
September 21, 2009
Had you read Tim’s doctorate thesis rather than complaining about how bad he smelt, you would now understand why captcha’s are like they are!
matt5409
September 21, 2009
By all means send me a copy! I would love to know why they need to be so distorted… unless they’ve created sophisticated spambots that can actually read flat text images – even Googlebot can’t do that!
Dimitar Christoff
October 14, 2009
erm, yes – i also had the same thought so i wrote my own captcha that is visual and separates human for bots in a nice way.
http://fragged.org/dev/hOOmanTest_captcha_for_mootools.php