Brent Logan - Latest Comments in Please, Don’t Use Captcha

Re: Please, Don’t Use Captcha

Brent Logan — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:59:22 -0000

Kal, you're right. I don't run a web server for high-traffic sites. That doesn't mean I don't have to worry about spam. Prior to this current experiment with the IntenseDebate commenting service, I used Akismet to handle the spam. By late 2007, it had blocked 100,000 spam messages. No way would I want to handle that volume of spam manually. Akismet's not perfect. It doesn't do well against hand-crafted, custom spam messages left by humans. But Captchas don't work against those, either.

The Captcha that inspired this post was brutal. I failed four times even though I was cherry-picking the Captchas I thought I could guess. Assuming this site actually wants subscribers, this is a major FAIL.

Re: Please, Don’t Use Captcha

Brent Logan — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:59:22 -0000

The Captcha that inspired this post was brutal. I failed four times and that even though I was cherry-picking the Captchas I thought I could guess. Assuming this site actually wants subscribers, this is a fail.

Re: Please, Don’t Use Captcha

Kal — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:36:32 -0000

Hey guys -
I can tell you guys don't run web servers for companies, clients, etc. I'm a web admin for only four not-even-very-big sites (only around 10,000 visitors a day), and without captchas, I end up spending time every day removing spam comments and spam users... what a freakin' waste of my time... and the horrid crap these spammers post... uuuhhgg. Let's just say, it isn't a good day when the president of the company sees ugly porn spam comments on his website. When it got to requiring 100 or more deletions a day - and the weekends were the worst - I turned on captchas. They helped a lot. Now if we can just get companies to stop paying spammers to "market" for them, we can really bring round the problem.

Re: Please, Don’t Use Captcha

Jmartens — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:11:55 -0000

CAPTCHA's are really getting out of hand. I sometimes think that is a solution to a problem that may not even exist.