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Thread: Why Captchas?
Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)
From: Emma Duke-Williams
Date: Mon, May 21 2007 1:40PM
Subject: Why Captchas?
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I've got a friend who uses a screen reader & she's getting very
frustrated by sites that have captchas - and aren't good at the
"Click this link & we'll get back to you if you can't see..." -
(Yahoo! being the particular culprit at present!)
I'm not visually impaired, but I find quite a few of the captchas hard
to use (blogspot's is one of the few that I can "get" first time,
YouTube's is about the worst - I need several goes)
WHat I can't quite understand is why so many sites use them in
preference to the option that I much prefer - of the site sending you
an email, with a clickable link to complete your registration.
Is that inherently easier to spam with a robot?
Have studies shown that the average surfer would rather interpret a
captcha than click on a link in an email?
Or, am I (and my friend) just choosing to register with far more sites
that use captchas over those that use emails??
Emma
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Blog: http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/
From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Wed, May 23 2007 4:02AM
Subject: Re: Why Captchas?
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> What I can't quite understand is why so many sites use them in
> preference to the option that I much prefer - of the site sending you
> an email, with a clickable link to complete your registration.
It is relatively easy to script a bot that can receive and respond to an
email, which means it isn't a good method of preventing bots.
Not that CAPTCHA is either, especially when people are being paid to
break them.
Kind regards,
-Alastair
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Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience
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From: Christophe Strobbe
Date: Thu, Jun 07 2007 3:10AM
Subject: Re: Why Captchas?
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Hi,
At 21:37 21/05/2007, you wrote:
>I've got a friend who uses a screen reader & she's getting very
>frustrated by sites that have captchas - and aren't good at the
>"Click this link & we'll get back to you if you can't see..." -
>(Yahoo! being the particular culprit at present!)
>
>I'm not visually impaired, but I find quite a few of the captchas hard
>to use (blogspot's is one of the few that I can "get" first time,
>YouTube's is about the worst - I need several goes)
Some sites use a CAPTCHA with an audio alternative (as many on this list
already know). Now, you don't even have to develop those by yourself
because reCAPTCHA [1] makes them for you and you can use them through
APIs and plugins [2]. (And by using reCAPTCHA, you help the digitization
of books.) Has anybody tried this solution?
[1] <http://recaptcha.net/whyrecaptcha.html>;
[2] <http://recaptcha.net/resources.html>;
Best regards,
Christophe
--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
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