#15 So, do you think CAPTCHA is getting annoying?

CAPTCHA, that notoriously annoying combination of numbers and letters, is getting harder and more annoying. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a necessary evil, but the lesser of two evils, for any web site owner that has some kind of HTML form on their web site, where HTML form data is saved to a database, flat file, or sent via email. The bigger evil I am talking about is receiving spambot data from these forms. So, Captcha seems like a good alternative, even though your visitors don’t like filling them out.

A lot of my web site visitors ask me to remove these images, and I professionally decline explaining why. Here’s the real prevalent problem: While we web developers and graphic designers attempt to make it harder for spambots to read these things, we seem to make it just a bit more difficult for human beings to read them as well, which defeats the entire purpose of having any HTML form at all. So, the spambots win and we constantly seem to lose. Unfortunately, as long as we have spabots filling out forms, we must have CAPTCHA until a better trend comes along.

In this podcast, I will tell you about some of the cool tricks web designers are using to make CAPTCHA easier or better yet, alternatives to deter the spambots. We will also talk about the security exploits of CAPTCHA no matter what web development language (I use PHP and ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET on my sites) you are using. We also talk about some technologies that may help CAPTCHA development like AJAX.

Tags: captcha web development ajax html Turing spam php .net