Why you should Stop Using CAPTCHAs

• February 3, 2012
Steven

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test you tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and their most used purposed it to stop automated submissions of web forms, like registration or contact forms. Those robots, they’re such tricky fellows.

While us normal folk think that CAPTCHAs are benefiting us, they are actually harming the usability of your website. Nowadays CAPTCHAs are becoming less and less legible, which is making actual humans leave pages out of frustration. And would you look at that your competition doesn’t have annoying CAPTCHAs to deal with, you just gave your competition a new client.

Another thing you probably haven’t even thought of is that as a web designer you aren’t really subject to the bots, so you’re just making your website suffer from the conformist approach to avoid them.

There are other ways to avoid bots:

1. Simple math questions, for example to validate that someone is human you can just make them answer what is 2 + 2.
2. Use Javascript, a Javascript function is called to perform some simple arithmetic and push the result into a hidden field which is then verified server-side. This is a good one to use if you know that your user-base is going to have Javascript installed, but it may prove to be counterproductive for those who have Javascript disabled.
3.  Use pictures, for example you can ask your customer to click on the telephone amongst pictures of cats to proceed.
4.  Ask them to complete a simple task, you can ask them to spell toothpaste or another simple word.
5. Use a service like Akismet, an excellent spam-filtering service for blog comments.
6. Or you can just put up with it; it’s up to you. Weigh the pros and cons and figure out what’s best for you.

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