Apr 17, 2007
I love CAPTCHAs. The amount of comment spam and contact form spam I have been getting has all but dropped to zero since adding a simple 3 letter CAPTCHA to my site.However, some CAPTCHAs can be a little tough to crack. Here's the best example of this I have seen yet, found on http://www.prcheckingtool.com/ (Yes, I heard rumours of an update, and I'm feeling insecure about the length of my green bar).
Here's that puppy at an enlarged size. Doesn't make it any easier really.
Wow. Evil. I don't even know where to start with this one. I think I'll use another PR checking tool instead.
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5 Comments
You will notice on my CAPTCHAs, I actually say that they aren't case-sensitive. That way, not only do you not have to bother uppercasing characters, but you know that you don't have to bother uppercasing your characters.
I feel this same way about Myspace with their anoying Captcha, 7-9 letters and there is a line running through it which makes it sometimes impossible to tell what letter / number it is. There was one time when I actually ented the Captcha Code 6 times just to update my own Page.
7 Tips to Help You Reduce or Stop Spam
1. Use a separate email address
2. Consider acquiring multiple email addresses for different purposes.
3. You can subscribe to services online that provide you with disposable addresses
4. Remove your email address from your website
5. NEVER buy anything from a company that spams
6. Filter your email.
7. Consider subscribing to a spam prevention service.
I got so frustrated with literate spambots that I went to bed one night trying to figiure out how to beat the little blighters.
At Epiphany O'clock (or 3:15am to normal folks) it hit me... they can read, but they can't count!
So, with the help of a mate who supplied me with a basic "string to image via GDlib" system, I built TiCS - the Teknofile imageCAPTCHA System... So far, hasn't be broken! Only moron-manual spam to date, and that is pretty easy to filter out if you turn off tags and abort if contains key spammy phrases.
It was a hoot... and was retrofitted to a number of spam-victim clients, plus gets built into all future sites I build.
Feel free to check it out...
Good to see this drives someone else nuts! I always struggle to pick the different cases used in captchas. Right now I'm wondering is that a lower cased k or a capital bold K hmmmm