Unfortunate evils: captchas
A few weeks ago, I started getting spam attacks on my forums. At first it was just a few here and there, and then they gradually became worse. Not only were the frequency of them going up, but the posts themselves were getting more revolting. I appointed people that I trusted in different parts of the world to monitor the forum and administer the spam, but it got so bad that they couldn’t keep up.
I upgraded the forum so that they use captchas from reCaptcha and since that time, I only had one spam message, and that was from a user whose account was created before I upgraded the site. Effectively, I haven’t had a single spam post since. I’m not saying that reCaptcha is perfect, but it does weed out the bots that infiltrate a site. Once a system has a way of breaking the less effective security (like those silly colored letters), your site is doomed.
On Jan. 19, soon after the spam stopped, I saw a tweet from @pprlisa:
@pprlisa I hope they a clearing a nice spot in hell for the creators and users of Captcha
This prompted a response from me:
@pprlisa Captcha got rid of the porn spam in my forums. I’m grateful for it.
@starmike yes and probably frustrated hundreds of would be posters who get sick of trying to guess what the hell words to type
@pprlisa I’m not a FAN of captcha, but if we didn’t have spammers in the first place we wouldn’t need them. Necessary evil.
@starmike although I still reserve the right to hate Captcha
The point is, how do you get rid of spam from your system when bots are doing the work, while making life easier for your readers? The fact is, captchas aren’t that hard to read, and if you’re having trouble you can ask for a new one. My options are few: either use the captcha and prevent spam, or open the gates and play whack-a-mole with the spammers. I’ve done the latter, I’d rather do the former.
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In my experience, people that care enough to join a community will deal with the five seconds it takes to handle a captcha. It’s a win-win situation since I feel embarrassed if spam gets on my forums and I have to go through the trouble of dealing with it.
I’d highly suggest that anyone who’s running a forum, please use reCaptcha. It’s working for me, and it’s free.
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Captcha isn’t as easy to use and as harmless on user experience, as you suggest. For one, you are discriminating against users with disabilities by using it since many will be unable to read these captcha images, as well as the elderly, dyslexic people, and anyone who has bad eyes. See what the W3C has to say on the topic if you don’t believe me – they describe the accessibility problems caused by Captcha here http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/
For a solution to blocking spam without the Captcha, check out http://www.SiteBrains.com — Disclosure: I am a Co-Founder and interested party in SiteBrains. We found it to replace Captcha with a user-friendly alternative that also works against human generated spam.
Are you seriously telling us that ALL of your spam was bot generated and none of the human spammers can hop the Captcha hurdle? That’s not what I’ve seen…
Well, since I removed the captchas, we got ZERO human-created spam.
I think that says that it was all bots.