Captcha has been brought onto the web to use of forms to stop spam bots from posting on sites and sending messages to people - Hence there name Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But, it now seems to me that some sites have taken it just too far. Obviously, spam bots aren't stupid and could be and probably have been programmed to recognize simple captchas. But, really they should be either made so atleast humans can read them! For example the third captcha down on the image to the right... what is that supposed to say?
For me I think the Digg Captchas (the top two on the image to the right) are about the limit for for what i would want to have to read to submit a simple form. Because, personally when you are writting a 10 word comment to a blog post you don't want to have to click submit 5 times before you eventually get thing to post!
I think we should start thinking about other things a person can do that a computer just wouldn't be able to do (or atleast not without considerable effort on the programmer's part). The best example I can think of is to put an extremely simple (and easy) flash game in the place of the captcha. This is the kind of game I am thinking of:
- you would have to use the navigation keys to step left then right.
- Then shoot a large target using the mouse.
I would have thought this game would be simple to write and "complete" but pretty hard for a programmer to make a spam bot complete. I think that would stop people having to submit forms 5 times and stop 99% of spam bots.
Hey... if anyone is a talented programmer, give it a go!