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Re: word verification

for

From: Cinnamon Melchor
Date: Feb 9, 2006 8:30AM

Marvin and others --

A colleague has a client that's requesting something like word
verification, and some of the brainstorming alternatives were:

-- ask the user a general knowledge question to proceed, something
like "what is the US president's last name?" or "what color is the
sky?", the thought being that it would be pretty difficult for bots to
get around this but pretty straightforward to a human user.

-- randomly display a sequence of words and ask the user to input the
first character from each word. e.g,

The
Dog
Jumped
Up

user enters: TDJU

-- audio cues wherein the user listens to a .wav or similar file and
enters what he hears as the validation word.

What do y'all think about the validity of these approaches?

Cheers,
Cinnamon Melchor
User Research and Creative Design
Sapient