Nice concise post. I, too, disagree with the flames regarding your post’s possible intention. Especially where others point out your lack of providing an “answer” or “alternative,” which I could have sworn you did with your comment-form plugin and discussion of your contact page (or did I miss something? I think too many people form opinions (and share them) without bothering to read even a relatively short post, such as this one, before they lash out (which accomplishes next to nothing)

This is an interesting debate and, no matter whether a solution is proffered, worthy of writing about if you want. It’s your blog, after all and – this is what bothers me the most about some of the comments – since when has blogging become a public responsibility? If you want to write about something, write about it. Anybody who doesn’t want to read still has the option to not read it. If you were charging a fee, this would be a different story, but, if I’m correct, weblogs spawned from the mass’s desire to post just about anything and/or everything that pops into their head and put it out for public display, or to make it easier to share with friends. Many blogs’ contents are not publicly accessible or even interesting to those not directly involved.

I had to laugh when I read about using this post to jack up your ad revenue. Perhaps (and I do hope so) your experience has been better than mine, but – unless you’re blogging to promote a product – you can write about captcha or you could write about how smelly generic dog food is and your contextual ad system will pay out at its usual unpredictable rate in either situation

That being said, if the CAPTCHA makers are reading, thank you for adding the audio! Black blackground with a tumultuously wavy white grid foreground over which ghostly white (and grossly distorted) letters are posted (sometimes over the edge of picture) is a perfect example of a situation that a human with reasonably decent vision will have difficulty deciphering, but a program will probably easily solve over time.

Just my 2 cents,

Best wishes to you,

Mike

No disputing their detrimental effect on user experience, but you have to admit that using minimal effort from each member of a vast pool of humans to do what even a very brainy computer cannot (read mangled text that defies Optical Character Recognition) is a pretty elegant solution.

Though generally speaking, yes, I’m all for using creativity instead of code when possible.

True, its not the usual mangled letters in an artificially grainy image, but it is something trying to tell computer and human apart.

Besides, if this is a topic that gets people’s attention, why the heck would you _not_ want to blog about it?

Of course in the end it’s just a matter of time before AIs break that. But I don’t think there’s a perfect solution than robots will never break, so this is good enough and doesn’t disrupt user experience at all (unless, of course, you consider yourself a spammer…)

Some of them would even force you to watch a 20 second ad video and then answer a question such as “Which company was this ad for?” While, I’m not a fan of that particular method (I hate to wait), it would be interesting to see what something like that does to ad revenue.

However I think the better solution is a basic math question, three variables:
1. Number 1 (0-9)
2. Number 2 (0-9)
3. Solution

It is done so the math is very easy, and you can figure out what the answer is from a script standpoint rather easily.

Imagine a CAPTCHA that you find difficult to read and then let someone with poor vision have a go. Difficult? Almost impossible.

How about someone with no vision at all, surfing the web with a screen reader or braille technology. A CAPTCHA is designed such that programs can’t read it. In this case, neither will the disabled user.

There are few accessible CAPTCHAs, ones that include a voice CAPTCHA for those who can’t see are an example, but the added usability concerns make it a technology that I would never consider implementing. Beat the spammers another way, don’t make your real users pay (also the reason I use the dofollow plugin).

Sounds as though you didn’t actually read my post. I never said my solution would scale nor should it be used by these companies. I did say that I’d like to see some companies (like Facebook) come up with a more ingenious solution. My plugin does allow you to change the challenge question and answer whenever you’d like – no bot is going to keep up with that. To date, I’ve had no SPAM on my contact page from this solution.

One example: Perhaps Facebook could actually profit from using an advertisement on the page and asking “Who’s ad is on this page?”. Anything is better than punching in a bunch of numbers and letters – if you can actually read them.

Cheers! Be sure to subscribe! hehe
Doug