Keep out the comment spam bots! On the receiving end of much internet spam roach droppings, I understand the use of captchas, those random letter combos generated as graphics, intended to keep out the automated spam bots on web submission forms. I have used them myself.
So I like them when the work for me, but oi! I cringe when I have poured my eneergy into writing the perfect comment and eager to see it posted, and Zam! I am forced to squint at some obscure twisted set of letters and punch the into the box. It really does short circuit the connection experience you just made with a blog writer and your communication. It completely drops a trap door open on your usability experience.
But okay, necessary, small evils we can live with.
What I do not like living with are crappy captchas, the ones that make you work hard to decipher, like this one:
While this one is rather legible in terms of the numbers/letters you can see (as opposed to some of those twisted ones on Blogger and elsewhere), if I did not bother to read the caption, I would not have thought there were five characters to monkey type in the form it sure looks like C484 to me. And don’t you wonder on these things:
What if I get it WRONG? Does it eat my comment, does it put my IP address on a bad list? (I know the answer, but it is not obvious to the victim)
Sigh, one more thing 98% of the web needs to jump through hoops for due to the abuse of its open-ness by link spam harvesters. This could all change in a heart beat or two, if Google woke up, smelled the spam, and took away the incentives that link rank creates.
Ouch, I keep dreaming.
I had the same problem on my forum Alan. The CAPTCHA that comes with phpBB has been cracked by bots for quite some time now, so I was getting all sorts of spam. I then tried an advanced CAPTCHA (that looks very much like the one you posted), and quickly realized it was a pain in the butt.
The solution? I now textual confirmation instead of visual confirmation on my forum. Not only is it visually-impaired friendly, but it’s a lot easier for a human being to answer the question “What planet do we live on?” than to decipher some cryptic looking image, and I haven’t had a single spam bot register on the site since.
meh. I’ve been presented with a captcha every time I post a comment on your blog for a while now. It hasn’t liked me for months, and accuses me of being an evil spammer – punished by having to decipher a captcha 🙂
Gulp, mea culpa. It was that, or everything you posted was flagged by SK as spam! I still think it was tripping up on that funky apaostrophe in your name — somewhere in PHP codeville, it was not doing a stripslash/addslash were needed.
But hey, how bad is my craptcha? I’ve never seen it….
Don’t forget about accessibility issues. If you’re having problems, imagine the readers who are either blind or have other vision problems. I was using one for a while, till the accessibility issue came on in my head like a light bulb. I’m using a challenge/answer trap now: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpress/wp-gatekeeper.html