I use reCAPTCHA to help prevent spam comments. It used to be very good, and had the added bonus that it’s helping to digitise books at at same time, rather than wasting effort.
However, it seems to be giving worse and worse CAPTCHAs lately, providing words that are almost impossible to read, and often words that are clearly not even English.
For instance:
What’s that?
I don’t want to put off real visitors from leaving comments by making them decipher things that are too close to nonsense, so I think I’m going to have to replace reCAPTCHA with something more suitable. Suggestions welcome.
Ive been getting very mad about this, and have been looking around for alternatives (hence find myself here). Ive seen a new type recently: Slide2Comment (a wp plugin) and there is also something similar around, where you slide to a requested number on a sliding scale – I’m actually trying to find it right now…
btw.. loved that thief fall/marines story..
I did find http://demo.confidenttechnologies.com/captcha/ when I was looking around, which looked fairly slick.
For the time being, as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve disabled the reCAPTCHA plugin, and will just keep an eye out for spam comments, and ensure I approve comments awaiting moderation quickly.
I’ll have a look for Slide2Comment, that sounds interesting too.
One thing I want to be sure of in any reCAPTCHA alternative that I consider is that it can work sensibly from mobile devices too. I don’t really want anything that requires Flash to work (ideally, I’d prefer it not to require Javascript to function either, which is a reason I liked reCAPTCHA, even if it’s much more pleasant to use with JS enabled).
Try a simple querry like 2+12=?