Comment » Are CAPTCHAs Useless?
I read a couple of interesting posts today about the effectiveness of CAPTCHAs:
Battling Comment Spam: Human Versus Human
These CAPTCHAs are just not working out
I had my doubts about how useful CAPTCHAs were once I read a while back about how people were being paid to solve them for spammers. I used to think it was a good idea, but now really doubt that they are really worth the trouble. People wanting to post real comments have another barrier, while spammers seem to just blow right past them. I would say my own success rate with actually being able to type them correctly the first time around is 80%. Like gun control, they seemed to be designed to harass the legit users and do little to deter the bad guys from pulling their tricks.
So for this reason, I disabled the CAPTCHAs in the comment and contact forms on one of my websites. I had very few comments when compared to my sites that don't use them, and I have a feeling that the CAPTCHAs were one of the reasons.
