To Captcha Or Not To Captcha
July 9th, 2008 by Sophie WegatLike many businesses we have online forms on our website to make it easy for prospects to get in touch with us. Unfortunately like many businesses this means we also get a lot of spam. Did I say a lot? I mean a ton. It’s frustrating and takes time to be cleared out of the in-box each day. So much so that my husband and I have discussed adding a captcha option to our forms.
If you’ve not heard of captcha before I’m sure you’ll remember a time you’ve filled out a form online and had to enter some funny looking characters before you could submit it. I also suspect you had to fill it out a few times because they never seem to be accepted first go. Now I don’t know about you but this frustrates the heck out of me - I just want to submit a form - why are you making it so difficult?
So I suspect you know what we decided. Not to captcha. Its a fantastic idea, and definitely has some uses, but why should we make our prospective clients lives that much harder to make our lives easier? It just doesn’t make (business) sense.
July 12th, 2008
10:31 am
I totally agree with this one, I looked at Captcha a long time ago and really there are many ways of overcomming bots and none need use the captcha. The ‘new thing’ is to get a human to sign up and send spam which is 100% effective anyway so realistically Sophie is on the money when she says why make it hard for ‘normal’ users, make it annoying for spammers and they’ll move on. The only 100% effective way of stopping abuse is to not have a form :/