Protection From Spam - There Has To Be A Better Way
Yesterday I joined up a client to Flickr. Which meant I had to create a Yahoo ID for them.With these sort of forms the site often uses a CAPTCHA - this helps determine if the user is human or not.
Basically that means an image is displayed with numbers or characters slightly difficult to read. The thinking being that humans can read it, and computers can't (not yet anyway).
You type in what you see and proceed through.
And thus the web site avoids the form being filled in a million times a day by a spam bot.
I Got This Correct!
This is the image I had to deal with yesterday. Amazingly to my old eyes, I got it right first go!But it is just too hard I reckon.
The Best Idea I've Heard For CAPTCHA Images
The best idea I've heard for CAPTCHA files is from Seth Godin. He suggested that instead of images like the one above, the site should get sponsorship from businesses and display their logo as the image.
Not a bad idea - good image for the CAPTCHA, the company gets some exposure and the costs are minimal.
Cheers
Brendon
[ comments ]
Going back to the spam issue directly, I recently installed a replacement to the CAPTCHA method over at the International Web Developers Network. We were getting up to five or six bots and/or human spammers registering each day and ultimately I woke up the next morning to find two or three new spam messages that had been thrown in to the scrap heap by one of our moderators.
So, last week I installed "No Spam!". This is a vBulletin plugin, and is intended to replace the CAPTCHA method. It's really quite simple; You create a set of questions which relatively easy answers (We have "What is two plus two?" currently) and the user who is registering has to answer correctly to complete the registration.
Since I installed it we have had no bot registrations or spam posts.
The plugin is fantastic. You did touch on computers not being able to read CAPTCHA images Brendon, but many bots can in fact read them. Like I say, we had up to five automated scripts (or "bots") get past our CAPTCHA each and every day. "No Spam!" solves this, and you can setup any number of custom questions, so the possibility of bots being able to get past this security feature is very slim.
You also touched on eye sight. Not only does this solve the spam problem, it also solves accessibility issues. Even I, a 19 year old guy with 20/20 vision, struggle to read CAPTCHA images quite often, and it drives me up the wall when trying to register for a forum and I have to try three or four times because I can't read the image. This question and answer system solves that problem, and it also allows those visually impaired people who are using a screen reader to register. Screen readers can't read a CAPTCHA image, but they can certainly read the question in text form on a page.
Just my two pennies from a guy who recently went through the whole forum spam thing.
Jamie
On the subject of a company logo, most company logos are, by design, easy to read and the host of ANTI-CAPTCHA systems out there would bypass them easily if the name is in the logo. if not, would a genuine poster know what company the logo was from?
Worth some thought though!
\Removes pressed nose from laptop screen/
J15F8
Am I right? That truly has to be one of the worst CAPTCHA images I have seen.
Jamie
Yep, J15F8 was it.
Well done - no glasses for you!
Brendon