To Captcha or not to Captcha... written 5 years ago

For those that don’t know, a CAPTCHA is an automated device to tell humans and computers apart. You’ll probably know it if you’ve ever tried to sign up for something on a high profile site. You get asked to type in a bunch of letters, which are shown in an obfuscated manner on a webpage.

This is in an attempt to stop spammers from abusing your site. Which incidentally has been happening here, quite a lot. I feel so used. It feels like someone spraypainting all over your nice freshly painted white wall.

Anyway, I’m trying to come up with a means of filtering out the spam on the site, and there just isn’t a 100% method to stop it. Just lots of heuristics, some of which make the site unusable to a significant portion of users.

So that’s why the comments are off for a while, I’m busy implementing the most fiendish and complicated submission system ever implemented!

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