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

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

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Brian Cray is a Columbus, Ohio-based web entrepreneur & consultant. View some of Brian’s work in his portfolio and learn how to make kick ass websites by reading his blog.

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