CAPTCHA - is there a better way?
 

Is it just me, or do people regularly have trouble with the CAPTCHA letters? It's very rare that I unlock the code on the first try. I try changing the letters and they usually come back more unreadable. I try listening and then I can't get back to the original CAPTCHA.

Maybe it's me, because my mother did drop me on my head as a child. Repeatedly. But if anyone has some insight, I'm all ears.

never have trouble, but the recent thread on this subject had an example that was entirely unreadable

1. Use blacklists like stopforumspam and fassim. I block thousands of spammers a day using these services.

2. Reduce the incentive to spam with clever use of no-follow and establish a reputation for never allowing spam to get through or stay up for even 24 hours. Many will eventually give up, believe it or not!

3. Require captcha or manual approval only for more questionable actions. For instance let comments go through without these but require them when a link is present and the user isn't logged in.

4. Sometimes "secret words" work great if yours isn't a huge site where it's worth it for spammers to manually correct the secret word in use. Honeytraps can also help.


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Oh you mean as a user. I don't think there is much you can do. Sometimes it helps to enlarge the captcha so you can see it better and study it. CTRL+ or CTRL+(mouse scroll up)

I hate obnoxious captcha's... I have never had problem with simple text that changes every pageview and tell the user to put that in the box.

You can try doing something like adding a hidden field called 'captcha' to your form, and ignore the POST if it's populated. That works in many cases for automated stuff.

If even more security is needed you can use out-of-band communication with the user such as sending them a email or sms with a code that they enter into the form.

I feel there's better alternatives to stopping spam than annoying your users.

captcha in most of time have CONTROL WORD, usually that one word is easy to read and second one blurred and shiiten to death is unnecessary...

i always thought this was the case..