A Great Alternative to CAPTCHAs
MAR 25th 2008 • 1 Comments
CAPTCHAs (which supposedly stands for Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart - too many T's though) can be a royal pain to work with. the blind and visually impaired have a very hard time with them. I have good eyes and I have a hard time with them sometimes. Add to that, they're annoying. But honestly, they're overkill for a large majority of sites.
I was getting absolutely bombarded with spam comments until I put in an extremely simple check. I have the user type the letter H (any case) in a special field before submitting the comment, if they fail to do so, their comment is simply ignored. It works perfectly, and my spam count has dropped to zero.
Yes, a robot can be trained to read the instructions I've provided and automatically enter the letter, but robots can't train themselves, they need people to tell them what to do, and what to look for. Artificial intelligence is indeed improving to the point that this may not work, but if the technology exists, it's not being employed on my site. And the simple fact is, my little site is not worthy of that much attention. And I dare say the majority of websites out there would not be worthy of that much attention either. If they ever do adapt, I'll just change the formatting a little bit and throw them off, but I doubt that will ever happen.
So unless you're running the next Digg, I think you'll be fine taking an approach like this. And the best part is, the visually impaired will be able to use your site as well without any headache!
posted in: Development | Internet |
Shawn • Apr 16th 2008 • 12:42 am
This reminds me of the simple math problems that I see cropping up all over the place. You don't even have to add for this one. Good logical solution for sites under the radar.