Re: alternative to captcha image?
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 4:16 pm
Hello everyone,
personally I am no big fan of captchas. Even the sophisticated ones with audio help are unsolveable for quite a lot of people due to some sort of handicap, may it be a disability or just not enough experience with the medium. And for those who can solve them without problems, they are still a pain in the ass.
The "click-on-the-right-picture" idea is much more user friendly but still evil in terms of accessability, as already mentioned by Chris. I chose a similar approach by generating a picture with a ring on it, the users were recognized as humans by clicking close enough on the ring.
Trying my best to develop accessible websites it seemed to be a bad joke putting something like a captcha on the pages.
The "logic" approach with asking questions I didnt even try - as you can read, english isnt my native tongue and I also face users from different countries. The language barrier is very quick too high then/a too strong limitation of the audience of a site.
What has been working well for me is a combination of several simple ways to "rate" the user. F.e. I always include a timestamp to my forms and check it on submission - most bots submit under 10s after the request (this doesnt work for certain forms like logins, of course). Invisible Fields with the label "Leave this field empty" (language barrier, I know) which arent empty on submission increase the rating as well as the usual suspicions like too many urls containing "vi.ag.ra!" etc.
Is a user rated high, I check his data with some service like Defensio.com and finally display a captcha.
Until now this works perfectly for me and I didnt hear any complaints about accessability issues, yet.
Hope to hear your thoughts on this subject, greetings
personally I am no big fan of captchas. Even the sophisticated ones with audio help are unsolveable for quite a lot of people due to some sort of handicap, may it be a disability or just not enough experience with the medium. And for those who can solve them without problems, they are still a pain in the ass.
The "click-on-the-right-picture" idea is much more user friendly but still evil in terms of accessability, as already mentioned by Chris. I chose a similar approach by generating a picture with a ring on it, the users were recognized as humans by clicking close enough on the ring.
Trying my best to develop accessible websites it seemed to be a bad joke putting something like a captcha on the pages.
The "logic" approach with asking questions I didnt even try - as you can read, english isnt my native tongue and I also face users from different countries. The language barrier is very quick too high then/a too strong limitation of the audience of a site.
What has been working well for me is a combination of several simple ways to "rate" the user. F.e. I always include a timestamp to my forms and check it on submission - most bots submit under 10s after the request (this doesnt work for certain forms like logins, of course). Invisible Fields with the label "Leave this field empty" (language barrier, I know) which arent empty on submission increase the rating as well as the usual suspicions like too many urls containing "vi.ag.ra!" etc.
Is a user rated high, I check his data with some service like Defensio.com and finally display a captcha.
Until now this works perfectly for me and I didnt hear any complaints about accessability issues, yet.
Hope to hear your thoughts on this subject, greetings