Does Your Website Need Some CAPTCHA?
Posted: Thursday, July 20, 2006
by cmrlkr
Part Time Work at Home Opportunities
Many Business website owners have faced this problem: They want to provide a function on their site for visitor’s to send feedback to them without opening the floodgates to spammers.
Posting your email address on your website is generally an invitation for spam. Automated programs better known as “bots" will eventually scan your website and parse out your email address from the rest of the source code and use it for purposes other than what you intended.
Another technique is to not post your email address at all on your website, but rather provide a “Feedback" or “Guestbook" type form where visitors can enter comments and then submit using the website form. This keeps the email address off the website completely by making use of a server side script which is activated when the visitor submits the form. Generally this script then formats an email message and sends it to the website owner using an email program on the server itself. The actual email address is encoded in the script or a database and is not available to outside visitors.
These feedback type forms help, but it is still possible to automate the entry of these forms, with the resulting “spam" being received. It does raise the bar, so to speak, in making it more difficult to automate but not impossible.
A better option to use along with these website forms is CAPTCHA. You’ve probably seen this in use on large websites with user signup pages. Before submitting the form, the user is required to read some distorted letters on the screen and enter them as verification. The idea is that the distorted letters or characters cannot be interpreted by computer programs so that the web form being submitted is automatically validated as originating from a human being rather than some automated program.
CAPTCHA is actually an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The term is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University and was started in 2000, so it’s not been around too long. In reality a CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade different kinds of tests that most humans can pass, but computer programs can not pass. The most common one known is the distorted letters and numbers test. A CAPTCHA must be fully automated without any user intervention, which makes it a reasonable option for website owners.
Adding a CAPTCHA program to your site helps provide a reliable method to validate that the information being submitted is from a real, live human and not from some automated program. The use of CAPTCHA is becoming more widespread and is not just on the major websites any longer. A lot of site integration examples can be found in the common website programming languages.
Some good resources to get started with CAPTCHA can be found at:
- http://www.captcha.net/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
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Craig Ritsema operates a successful part time home business and resides in Michigan, USA. For more details visit his site at: http://www.part-time-work-at-home-opportunities.com
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)How can anyone with a brain actually ADVOCATE site owners flaunting their illiterate inability to write or spell legibly with this fad of making captchas just for the fun of sadistically tormenting people by trying to make them guess what words they are trying to spell with those awful strings of pure nonsense?
Why do site owners want to deliberately sadistically torment site visitors and users with these illegible strings of pure nonsense captchas, just to make it hell for a person to post or download something or do anything on a site? Isn't it counterproductive for a site owner to try to drive people away from their site with this sadistic hell of tormenting people with captchas?
I have 20/20 vision, don't need glasses or contact lenses, and most captchas are total HELL for me to read & try to guess what word the idiots were trying to spell with their illegible illiterate nonsense. When I have a migraine and still have to do something online, this illiterate nonsense captcha fad that site owners think is so much fun to torment people with, often make the headache become so much more intense that I end up being unable to endure looking at the computer screen and end up having to just shut it down. Migraines are bad enough with the way they make bright light hurt the eyes and increase the headache pain, migraines sometimes cause temporary blurred vision or other temporary visual changes and I wish every site owner that so sadistically gets their kicks tormenting users with their stupid illegible illiterate nonsense strings called captchas, would have to experience having a bad migraine and having to try to look at the computer screen and figure out what word they were trying to spell with their distorted stupid mess & feel every bit of the pain and agony intensification that straining to read their crap causes.
Migraines cause pain so bad that bright light hurts the eyes, a person can have nausea and vomiting and diarrhea with it, have a number of temporary changes in vision during the time the headache persists (and a migraine often persists for as long as 2 or 3 days before it lets up), and this stupid sadistic fad of tormenting people with captchas is just one more unnecessary thing that intensifies pain that already is so intense that if splitting your skull open with a brick would relieve the pain, you feel like you'd do it because it would hurt less than the migraine itself.
If you look at how people used to write, spell and use grammar during the first half of the 20th century, you will find that present day writing, spelling, and grammar is vastly inferior to what you see in books or texts written back then.
While spell checkers make plenty of mistakes, mostly due to their limitations and inability to distinguish between forms of words such as "too, two, to" or "there, they're, their", they are still vastly superior to these strings of nonsense captcha garbage.
It's totally pointless for someone to make horrible freehand writing attempt messes, when MS Paint provides for creating graphic text that is neat and readable. If you can't write legibly, USE MS PAINT to type your nonsense captcha garbage so at least it will be readable. BETTER YET, LEARN HOW TO WRITE LEGIBLY AND SPELL PROPERLY.
Before I was 3 years old, I knew how to read and could print simple words, REAL WORDS, that were MORE LEGIBLY PRINTED THAN THIS ILLEGIBLE CAPTCHA NONSENSE that has become such an insane site owner fad! I knew that words weren't spelled with letters and numbers jumbled together, I already knew the correct usage of capital letters (which btw, is NOT to mix them up in the middle of a word!). Most halfway intelligent people at least master these basic skills by the time they are in first grade.
This fad of site owners tormenting site users with the hell of trying to guess what these illegible strings of nonsense are supposed to actually spell, IS INSANE. What if everybody decided they would no longer write legibly or spell words correctly and made everyone else guess what a string of illegible nonsense garbage mess of letters and numbers jumbled together with capital letters tossed in anywhere within the mess, was supposed to actually mean? Nobody would be able to understand a damn thing anybody else was writing if we all followed this idiotic captcha fad. IF enough people happen to decide this stupid fad of site owners tormenting people with illegible illiterate nonsense garbage captcha hell is cool and start doing it too, in lieu of writing legibly or spelling words at least well enough that a reasonably literate person can make a guess that's close to the word that it's meant to actually be, ALL THIS STUPID FAD CAN POSSIBLY EVER LEAD TO IS TOTAL CHAOS!
Shouldn't literacy and the ability to write legibly be encouraged instead of discouraged or replaced by illiterate illegible nonsense? THE SOONER THIS IDIOTIC ILLITERATE ILLEGIBLE CAPTCAH NONSENSE FAD ENDS, THE BETTER!
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