Post FeedThe captcha testing post
Almost no one actually reads my blog, but spammers seem to like it anyway – I get from 10 to 50 spam comments each day. It could be worse, you might say, but nevertheless I grew tired of moderating all these comments and decided to do something about it. So I implemented a captcha – but a special one. The normal »type the text that is contained in this image« class of captchas IMHO is broken by design – either it’s so simple that OCR bots will easily get past it, or it’s hard to implement and even harder to read, so that regular human visitors will have problems recognizing the badly twisted letters. Also, an image-based captcha won’t work for blind people. Audio captchas are even worse, because it requires the user to active Flash or some other dubious plugin or even download a file and listen to it, which may be a problem if there are no speakers connected to the PC or you are in an environment that requires silent operation (e.g. a library). In other words, captchas suck.
This is why I chose another approach: A text captcha. It poses a simple, plain-text English question about basic common knowledge things that should be sufficiently easy to answer. Or, to put it another way: If you are able to read and understand the post and write a comment on it, you are surely able to answer the captcha question, too.
This post is here for a single purpose: To test the captcha. I will use it to put some testing comments here, but you are also welcome to add anything you like, share your opinion or suggest new categories for the »quiz«.
OK, so here it is, the first real comment. Let’s hope it works …
Test
erinnert mich an die fragen bei leisure suit larry & the lounge lizards…
well, works.
test?
I also wanted to answer one of those really difficult questions.
now let’s see if it still works after I did some modifications …
this is interesting. simple and intuitive.
let’s try.
Well, nice idea and it works…
But for how long? I’m afraid it’s just a matter of time until spambots feature a list of commonly used questions and keep trying until they get a question they know, so everyone using this technique will have to create and update his own unique list.
It’s like fighting windmills. *sigh*
questions too hard!!
Richard: Are they? I deliberately picked questions that should be really very simple. The only real requirements are primary school level education and some knowledge of the English language.
:P
you should make them mathematical, universaly known.