CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!

Posted on March 5, 2008
Filed Under Blogs |

Whenever I run into a captcha I wonder what the effect is on participation when it is conceivable that a significant percentage of internet users will abandon the effort after a few failed attempts. It’s not uncommon that I will have to enter captcha text 2-3 times before succeeding (typepad seems most problematic for me). These along with their close cousin, logic and math tests, are terrible solutions to the bots vs. humans problem.

At some point, unfortunately, CAPTCHA devolves from a simple human reading test into an intelligence test or an acuity test. Depending on how invasive you want to be, you’ll eventually be forced to move to two-factor authentication, like sending a text message to someone’s cell phone with a temporary key.

[From Coding Horror: CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!]

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