Invasion of The Captcha Monsters!
Trend: Captcha Verification
Let me start of by saying something totally obvious… I am not a smart man. Shocking, I know. I also scare easily, as a kid I could never make it through a full episode of a Scooby Doo cartoon because the spooky music would always freak me out before the giant bog monster/ghost bull/angry pirate was revealed by those “meddling kids.” Seriously. Now speaking of fear inducing monsters – you know what often keeps me from completing a website form – if you guessed remembering my own name, you were totally wrong, it’s the dreaded captcha monster! Born out of the necessity to kill SPAM and limit the volume of “acai berry & increasing your manhood – wink wink” email offers, this creepy crawly has infected websites all across the Internet with a beast like efficiency .
Now let’s be honest, I can barely function on a day to day basis much less do I want to try and figure out what the hell some Rorschach type squiggly demented looking characters are after I have gone through the trouble of entering my personal info on a website. Is it a sideways V, one of those less than or greater than “alligator mouths”, a mutated 7, a giant bat? I don’t know but just like that Scooby music, I try to hang in there, but eventually I freak out and end up leaving.
He's cute but the captcha monster will totally eat your face off - Vote him DOWN!!!!!!!!!
References:
-
Vote on this trend:
-21 (27 votes)
Loading ... -
Tags: captcha, captcha monster, forms, scooby doo, web design, web standards
- Categories: Trends
MacB
Aug 28, 2009
8:52 am
Although the captcha monster is quite adorable, I have to sadly agree that we should hunt and eradicate all members of this species for endangering and chasing away human form submissions.
Dondo
Aug 28, 2009
8:56 am
Down with the Captcha Monster!
I hate those dang acid trip text boxes. I always feel like an idiot, when I have to put on my glasses, squint at the screen (while turning my head sideways) just to try and get my best guess estimate of what I am looking at.
And then to get it wrong……. (don’t get me started)
I got plenty of other issues to deal with. I don’t need the Captcha Monster judging me. I say Heck NO.
Ron Norman
Aug 28, 2009
8:58 am
The only thing worse than the Captcha is the Audio Captcha. Meant to address accesibility, it plays a sound and requires the user to type in the word(s) they just heard.
http://www.ddj.com/security/204800632
Usability FAIL!
Although, Captcha vs Audio Captcha does sound like a pretty epic battle
3dpete
Aug 28, 2009
9:20 am
This captcha monster you speak of. Does it have a twitter page?.
Andrea
Aug 28, 2009
9:45 am
Good post, I couldn’t agree more! That’s the #1 way to reduce people from contributing to your blog.
Your captcha monster looks nice, I’m tempted to vote him up.
Jordan
Aug 28, 2009
10:45 am
totally agree. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for the sideways 7 button and the bat key on my keyboard just to complete those forms. I always thought my keyboard was defective.
Chris Farmer
Aug 28, 2009
10:51 am
I’ll have to represent the opposite viewpoint here: captchas are a passable solution to a very real, very hard problem.
What would the net be like without them? Let’s say you invent the next Twitter or Facebook but you don’t use a captcha. Within two days of launch, every desirable account name has already been claimed by a spambot, so nobody can sign up. But nobody wants to because your whole system is flooded with spam anyway.
One alternative approach to the login problem is what Gmail did: be invite-only for a while. This is a huge barrier to entry, much bigger than a captcha. It works fine for huge systems with a lot of press, but doesn’t scale down to individual blog comments.
The usability problem is an engineering challenge. Sites should minimize use of captchas whenever possible. Maybe there’s a place for a centralized captcha clearinghouse: prove your humanity once a week or so and anybody with a blog can tap into that info somehow.
To the commenter on audio captchas: they’re designed for the blind only. Anybody who’s using them for general use is definitely committing a usability crime.
Captchas may be hard to use, that’s a valid opinion, but they’re necessary until someone can come up with a better way to eliminate abuse. As I see it, their greatest drawback is the constant reminder of humanity’s amazing ability to screw up everything good.
Jeff Noble
Aug 28, 2009
11:51 am
Hey Chris,
First of all, as a fellow writer on this site, shame on you for disagreeing with me. Shame. Shame. Shame.
Kidding… I understand what you are saying, there is a very real need for stuff like this, I just happen to think the existing captcha solution is horrible. It might solve the spam problem, but at a tremendous cost to the user experience.
As developers it should be up to us to provide technical solutions that work for us as well who these solutions are made for, put the users first. I could make the best spam blocker ever by disabling the “submit” button on a form, but it doesn’t necessarily make it the *right* solution.
John
Aug 29, 2009
3:46 pm
personally the the solution to avoid captchas is to provide a hidden input field with a unique key generated by the server. the key reference to the hosts ip on the server side and the number of tries and frequency of tries. if the frequency increases above some threshold then add captchas into the mix.
this would allow for the Openness interaction for normal users, and only add captchas in when the system detects a potential spammer (notice the use of the word potential, as it could just be a dumb user).
if the frequency goes up you could add artificial delays into server responses etc.
also should use a different captcha system each time. captchas have been show to be vulnerable to attach by spammers, though good character recognition software or large databases of valid responses etc.
this seems to work for most sites, and is fairly easy to implement. The basic challenge response type of login system is what many sites have moved it seems
Russell Wilson
Aug 30, 2009
8:24 pm
I’ve been impressed with the reCaptcha implementation that actually uses captcha to digitize old books… http://recaptcha.net/