CAPTCHA Alternatives

Have you seen something like this before? You probably have.

It’s called a CAPTCHA and it’s supposed to help stop spamming on websites. What happens though is that they are a bit annoying and in the end you might not need one.

Annoying and broken pretty easily

Josh Fraser blogged some time ago on “Why you should never use a captcha” and I subscribe entirely to what he says:

“CAPTCHAs are annoying, you probably don’t need one and even if you did it could still be broken pretty easily.”

Alternatives

Two nice and simple alternatives:

1. Hidden field using CSS: Josh himself points to this solution:

“add an extra field with a tempting name like “email” to your form that is then hidden using CSS. Humans can’t see the field and as a result will never fill it out. Any request that comes in with the field completed can easily be eliminated as spam. The beauty of this is you have a pretty effective spam-stopper without ruining the user experience or adding any friction to the process. A simple technique like this is probably enough to stop the majority of spam bots.”

2. A slider: Joe Stump tweeted about this one (which Josh also mentions) and it’s a really nice one I must add.

Time to move on from captchas? I think so.

http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-never-use-a-captcha/

http://twitter.com/joestump/status/16503358737

3 thoughts on “CAPTCHA Alternatives

  1. You might be wright, but none of the other solutions is so ingenious as reCaptcha – a captcha device and an open books human-powered OCR device at the same time.

    Even if reCaptcha has the same anoyingness of other captchas, it fullfills a major task besides fighting spam. Which makes it my nr. one choice.

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