Comments on: CAPTCHA – A sure-fire way to lose customers

By: Tiny

Tiny — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:53:48 +0000

Then you get ever better Captcha’s, like this 3D one being used at Yuniti.com

http://www.yuniti.com/register.php

It just looks so good. And I believe you will have far less false positives!

By: Oluniyi David Ajao

Oluniyi David Ajao — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:27:22 +0000

You are indeed a human being They must have had a temporary problem at the time you were trying. I dare say that captchas are a necessary evil. They help with managing spam on wordpress installations.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 01:12:29 +0000

I’m a web developer and have found captchas necessary to stop spam for my company and clients.

My solution for the sake of usability is to provide some form of “refresh” button next to the captcha. Refresh all you want until you find one that you don’t have trouble reading.

Not to mention that I generally implement forms that use Javascript to validate them before they get submitted, so you get a much quicker response if you got it wrong instead of having to wait for the page to reload.

Check out the captcha on the contact form here on my site: http://titaniumwebsolutions.com/contact (click the send email link to open up the contact form).

If you ask me, this is how captchas should be implemented. It’s tough for bots to crack due to the wavy, crammed together letters and made more usable by letting users get a new one if they can’t read the first one that loads with the form.

By: Ross

Ross — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:22:44 +0000

I also noticed that godaddy’s search wasn’t working… went and use http://www.whois.net instead. I think I’ll steer clear of register by the looks of things… will give me grey hairs by the looks of things.

By: Abraham van der Linde

Abraham van der Linde — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:36:43 +0000

Hey Justin.

I’ve been using a capcha on my about page with success, but as you say, there are those that just don’t work like they should.

Normally, When I enter something in a capcha and does not work on at least 3 consecutive retries, I quit doing it and leave the site.

My conclusion of capchas,:

NOT GOOD : not working always as in your case.

VERY GOOD : When it works, blocks spam and ill content better than Akismet.

Use it, don’t use it, up to you.

Final thoughts, Nothing beats personal moderation of comments. If you don’t like what you see, DON’T approve.

By: Sara

Sara — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:34:40 +0000

Pretty cool post. I just came across your site and wanted to say
that I have really liked reading your blog posts. Any way
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you write again soon!

By: Chris M

Chris M — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:06:59 +0000

Story of my life! GoDaddy hasn’t worked for me for over a month, it’s terribly annoying indeed, so I just went forward and built my own little checker in PHP

The number of times I’ve done CAPCHAs over and over and over is insane, definitely a “sure-fire way to lose customers”!

By: Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:14:23 +0000

Gustav, captcha will lose you customers if the technology doesn’t work. This isn’t a problem on one single site – it’s a problem on numerous. I decided to blog it because I’m tired of fighting with a technology that clearly doesn’t work for “humans”.

Clearly you’re pro the technology, I’m not convinced, particularly when it directly impacts on your ability to sell something to someone. It’s just not good business sense irrespective of whether it prevents your site from being abused.

By: Gustav Bertram

Gustav Bertram — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:04:41 +0000

There’s a huge difference between “Oh, this might be inaccessible to some disabled users” and “OMW, CAPTCHA will lose you customers!”

By: Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:12:55 +0000

Deems I tend to agree with you on that.

By: Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:12:21 +0000

Steve, that’s a really smart way of doing it!!!

By: Steve Crane

Steve Crane — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:10:46 +0000

I came across a very nice, simple CAPTCHA the other day. I forget where it was but it simply presented six normally-displayed characters, three of which were black and three red. Above the entry box was the instruction to enter only the red characters.

By: Deems

Deems — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:48:07 +0000

Justin, I’ve had the same problems with Register.com – I don’t think it’s a CAPTCHA issue as they generally do work well, but if not implemented correctly, well then it’s a case of GARBAGE IN = GARBAGE OUT.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the entries you posted screenshots of above. I just think the team that implemented it on Register.com’s WHOIS pages made some serious error.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:23:49 +0000

You’ll start to see the value of Captcha’s when you start dealing with a lot of “customer support” through your contact us pages.

If your traffic is large, inevitably your contact us spam is proportionally large. Without captchas, handling these messages for a small company is a nightmare!

I think they’re a G-d-send!

P.S. they should work if you’re going to use them

By: Lester Hein

Lester Hein — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:02:57 +0000

I while back I started getting more and more spam bots and dodgy russian registrations on my blog.

I added a CAPTCHA form to the registration page and since then they’ve stopped coming through. The good thing I noted was that the number of legit regs. didn’t tail off, so I guess it’s working.

I use SI Captch a for WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/) and can’t say that I’ve had any issues so far.

By: Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:43:31 +0000

Gustav, the W3C Working Group paper wasn’t insightful?

By: Gustav Bertram

Gustav Bertram — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:25:08 +0000

You are dismissing an entire technology based on one bug, on a single site!

In addition, your article title is misleading. I thought you would have some unique insight. Instead I found a rant.

Here’s a thought. Put all this in an email, and send it to register.com!

By: Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:18:59 +0000

Conrad, thanks for confirming my suspicions!

Rustig – I don’t even both with noise captcha – I just move on

Johann, love recaptcha.net – just a bit of latency if you use it on your own site which is a small problem but for end-users it’s the best Captcha technology IMO

By: Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:11:34 +0000

Stew I hear you completely. However, if it’s on a blog I’d look at trying to implement Akismet (akismet.com) as it’s not only a WordPress thing or if you really want a Captcha then I’d use recaptcha.net as they’re more in alignment with accessibility guidelines – plus I generally am able to pass their tests

By: Johann du Plessis

Johann du Plessis — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:08:53 +0000

I have found that ReCaptcha (recaptcha.net) works extremely well. The great thing about how it works is that the one word it displays (the one it actually uses to make sure you’re not a robot) will have been correctly identified by 1000′s of other users. I rarely make a mistake when entering one of their captcha’s (which I do a lot), and I’ve found it to be very secure.

As for other captcha systems, I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been frustrated as well. I have given up many times to register for a site, just because their captcha is too difficult.