The Good, The Bad, and the CAPTCHA (Guest Post!)
This a guest post from Max Nussenbaum from Are You a Human. Max is Are You a Human’s jack of all trades, dedicated to vanquishing CAPTCHA from every last corner of the internet.
We’ve all been there: you’re buying a concert ticket, or commenting on a blog post, or sharing a link on your friend’s Facebook wall, when—BAM—like a soccer ball to the face, there it is:
A CAPTCHA. We’ve all seen them. But have you ever wondered where CAPTCHAs came from and how they came to disgrace so many of your favorite web sites? Reader, wonder no more. All of your questions—and more—are about to be answered.
Not that kind.
Our story begins with a trip back in time, to a magical little year known as 2000. The presidential election was being contested, the dot-com bubble was collapsing, and bots were beginning their long, slow assault on the internet. These malicious, automated programs were spewing spam into blog comments and signing up en masse for bogus email accounts.
It was then that Carnegie Mellon researcher Luis von Ahn had an idea. Why not force site visitors to decipher a short string of letters before completing certain tasks? Any literate human could do it—but, since computers are bad at recognizing shapes, the bots would fail the test. And thus was born the CAPTCHA. Soon CAPTCHAs were everywhere: fighting comment spam on blogs, stopping scalpers on Ticketmaster, and even blocking bots on the official White House web site.
Unfortunately, as time went by, computers got a lot better at reading, and the CAPTCHAs were forced to become correspondingly more difficult. What used to look like this…
…now looks more like this:
In their zeal to keep the bots out, CAPTCHAs have started to keep a lot of real people out as well. It now takes the average person 2.3 tries to solve a CAPTCHA, and one in four fail on the first attempt! (Source.) Indeed, entireblogs now exist to collect and share the most epic CAPTCHA fails.
Some classic CAPTCHA fails. Source: captchafails.tumblr.com.
If you’re thinking about implementing CAPTCHA on your own web site, our first piece of advice is—DON’T! There’s often a better solution out there that lets you avoid CAPTCHA entirely. For example, CAPTCHAs used to be common in blog and newspaper commenting systems, but many have since begun linking their comments with Facebook instead. (This often has the added benefit of improving the quality of the comments, as people tend to be more respectful when they can’t hide behind anonymity.)
But sometimes there’s no getting around the fact that you do need a human verification system: if your users need to be able to submit anonymous feedback, for example, or if you need to stop bots from signing up for accounts on your site.
Of course, you could use a CAPTCHA. But at Are You a Human, we think there’s a better way. Our CAPTCHA replacement is a series of fun games that serve the same verification purpose, but don’t make you want to punch puppies in the face.
PlayThru by Are You a Human. Click the game to give it a try!
So the next time you’re thinking about using a CAPTCHA, think twice. People hate them. And though CAPTCHA may be a small part of your site, no part is too small to delight your users.
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About the Author
Eva (@evachristine09) is a public relations intern at Formstack. She is a senior at Anderson University, studying communication arts with a focus in public relations. When Eva's not working for Fifth Street Communications, AU's student-staffed PR firm, you can find her hanging out with her friends or taking too many pictures of her cat. Probably the latter.
Playthru is absolutely awesome! If only the whole of the internet would see sense! I got so fed up with unreadable Captcha’s that I started using a program called rumola to enter them for me!
So is CAPTCHA is so bad, why does Formstack still support it and why not implement newer forms of protection like Playthru?
Good question, Pete! We think Are You a Human is a great company and we hope to integrate with them in the future. However, our current partnerships process only allows us to concentrate on a few new integrations at a time. Stay tuned, and I’m sure those nasty CAPTCHAs on our form builder will eventually be replaced with a Playthru game.
This is really cool but I have a legitimate concern. It seems this product has been “hacked” by the bad guys because its not really a security product. Here’s what I found: http://spamtech.co.uk/software/bots/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/
Are there any plans to make this effective for security? Thanks
Melanie—the hacker you’re pointing to cracked our demo version from back in May, if you look at the comments on that page you’ll notice that he was only able to do so after Are You a Human co-founder Tyler helped him out. More information on our multi-level security is here: http://areyouahuman.com/how-playthru-stops-the-bots/.