A number of blogs and forums I visit now protect their comment sections with CAPCHAs, form fields in which you have to type a number/letter combination displayed in an image above the field, in order to prove you're a human. Allow me to state three things for the record, so you can laugh at me if I change my mind in a few months or so.
1. I fucking hate them.
2. I expect spammers will find a way to defeat them, whether this will be Chinese slave labor or a clever combination of Bayesian filtering to determine whether a form field may be a CAPCHA and OCR.
3. Consequently, I do not intend to use this technology on this weblog right now.
Comments (3)
Actually those images are usually pixelated/filtered/blahed in such a way as to make OCRing really hard. Mind you, there's some that make just seeing the number very hard :)
Posted by Mithandir | May 20, 2004 11:11 PM
Posted on May 20, 2004 23:11
Slave labour it will be, then.
Posted by reinder | May 20, 2004 11:14 PM
Posted on May 20, 2004 23:14
well there are porn sites that just make their users have to type in what it says for them so they can spam. That was in the news a few months ago.
On the other hand I don't see it as that much of a discomfort to me and it does seem to have some effectivness.
Posted by smilodon | May 21, 2004 5:37 AM
Posted on May 21, 2004 05:37