An epic CAPTCHA disaster (AKA screw the user)

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Pictured below is an epic CAPTCHA disaster on Sphinn’s registration page that I spent 5 minutes trying to pass.

sphinnsignup

Oh how I hate CAPTCHA, the popular little form spam preventer. While good in theory, CAPTCHA punishes a user that’s probably trying to either register with a website or contact the people behind it—neither of which do you ever want to make more difficult.

As an alternative to CAPTCHA, why not ask your user a super simple question in plain text that only a human could answer? Like, “Are we on planet Earth?” or “Are you using a computer?” or even “Are you human?”

But whatever you do, don’t make your users work on your site. Ever.

CAPTCHA alternatives from my readers

  • Shelly from Brass Blogs

    Shelly suggests creating a form field that is hidden with CSS. Humans won’t see it and bots will think they need to fill it out. Brilliant solution.

  • Share your solution by leaving a comment

12 comments skip to comment form

  1. Shelly said— 15 minutes later

    I detest CAPTCHA.

    For my forms, what I do instead is provide a hidden field. I add a label (for accessibility) telling the end user to leave it blank. If ANY input is placed in that field, the form will not go through, instead an error is returned.

    Normal end users won’t even see the extra field (it’s hidden with the stylesheet) and therefore, won’t put any info into it. The only people who *would* put info into is a spambot, which is usually set to fill in all available fields – they would be rejected.

    It’s worked a treat for years.

    #1

  2. Brian Cray said— 17 minutes later

    Wow Awesome solution Shelly! Thanks for sharing!

    #2

  3. Patrick Cook said— 2 hours later

    I agree, captcha sucks. But ever since I saw this video on PBS I like to think I’m giving back to humanity every time I fill one out:

    http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/284-luis_von_ahn.html

    #3

  4. Ben Lind said— 1 day later

    My favorite question was “What was the color of George Washington’s black horse?” True, it makes you think for a second (if you read it through fast), but it also gives the user a laugh.

    #4

  5. Brian Cray said— 1 day later

    LOL Ben! Great question :P

    #5

  6. Yael K. Miller said— 2 days later

    I can’t stand CAPTCHA because most of the time it’s unreadable (Google) — I think you have to be a bot to read it.

    I don’t mind re-CAPTCHA because it’s always readable plus it’s helping to scan books which makes me happy.

    #6

  7. Joel Gascoigne said— 3 days later

    I’ve been against CAPTCHAs for a long time now, and I couldn’t agree with you more! I agree with Buck Wilson: “Seriously don’t put the burden of your spam problem on the users.”

    Some fantastic ideas in the comments here! I also think, if the CAPTCH is for catching comment spam at least, things like Akismet can mean you don’t really need anything like a CAPTCHA or even the alternatives suggested.

    #7

  8. @tcolar said— 1 week later

    If you think that’s bad, check that captcha i got !

    http://wiki.colar.net/capctha_gone_wrong

    #8

  9. Larissa Reynolds said— 1 week later

    I have yet to meet anyone that doesn’t hate CAPTCHA. It’s not so much the “are you human?” question, but resentment at being accused of being a bad guy for trying to do what the Web site’s call to action just asked you to do in the first place (join, register, ask a question, whatever). It’s not “prove your human” – it’s “prove you’re not a criminal.” If brick-and-mortar store accosted every customer as they walked through the door and asked them to “prove” they weren’t a shoplifter, there’d be a riot.

    We use Form Armor to accurately detect and stop spam on Web site forms behind the scenes. (Disclaimer: I’m the CEO.) It’s a Web-based service and requires no CAPTCHA tests, questions, math problems or other craziness. Since it provides “invisible” form protection, it also doesn’t interfere with usability or accessibility issues, or conversion rates. We like to think of ourselves as the “anti-CAPTCHA” alternative for Web form security. ;)

    #9

  10. Sam said— 1 week later

    Really? You use your own product?

    You must get a deal.

    #10

  11. Jason said— 2 weeks later

    I use the solution Shelly talks about in the first comment. Its simplicity and effectiveness is golden.

    #11

  12. Rashmi Ranjan said— 3 weeks later

    Thanks for the share. Actually my website response had gone down to minimal. I will try your suggestion. It sounds great.

    #12

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