Bad for Business?

[Tower - Justin]

I felt the need to discuss “CAPTCHA” (That annoying test used in to ensure that a response is not generated by a computer, anti-spam filter)

I understand the concept & the purpose it serves (I’ll be it a good/valid/important purpose)

That being said; is it just me…or has this become a serious pain-in-the-ass?

Where is the line drawn between anti-spam precautions & downright ridiculousness…My thoughts:











I Will be the 1st to admit that I am not completely familiar with the algorithms used by these spam bots. But are these sort of precautions entirely necessary? Can a line of code honestly differentiate between this orgy of alphanumerics?

My Concern:

Is this becoming a conversion issue? Are people potentially so turned off by this nonsense that they are dissuaded away from signing up to a particular forum/site? I think is becoming an issue...Just my opinion, what do you think?

[Chalkie]

I struggle to read the questionable ones with my old eyes that are in need of specs.

The 3rd category i just turn around in despair knowing i have no chance!

[pokerprop]

I can't read the ones google uses (questionable category). I save the image blow it up really large then try to figure out what the letters are. My brain doesn't work well reading the garbled text, not exaggerating it is quite a challenge for me.

[Unknown Webmaster]

As long as they actually work, I don't really mind
Unfortunately there are some captchas out there that only work in IE, which drives me to the edge of insanity each time I come across them.

1 year ago there were an interesting post about cracking captchas on Bluehat SEO.

[Jeremy]

I can't tell you how many times I have X'd out of pages or whatever because of annoying unreadable capthca's. The even funnier ones now are the out loud captcha's where it sounds like someone in a tunnel screaming stuff.

Both are a nuisance.

[doovde]

Hate them, the number of times I've failed to get the one off google mail / keywords right is unreal and I have 20/20 vision.

[Greg]

Good examples above Justin. Honestly, I'll bounce half of the time I can't get a captcha to load where I can read it. My favorite one that I ran into today was the 'click on all the animals' type! Here's an example:

[BreezeBG]

Hahaha nice one

[Marcelo]

I tried captcha on my forum, and there are spam softwares that would pass them! Now I use a simple question that my readers would easily know the answer - no more automated fake accounts.

Btw, the images one is also good, and could be themed to specific websites.

For example: click on the image until there are only poker pros. (don't forget to click Jamie Gold - jk lol)

[simoneaton]

I personally hate the ones that ask a hard trivia/brain teaser question. Such as;

You live in a house, what else can a house consist of?