by Sam Mauzy
Anyone that frequents message boards is familiar with the terms “troll” and “spammer.” These are people that sign up for a message board solely to spam it with comments and links. This happens all over the Internet, from message boards to blogs to the comments section on news articles. To prevent this many webmasters are adding a new security feature when users sign up for a site or post a comment. It is called captcha, which is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. We have all seen captchas. They are usually images of distorted numbers and letters, and often times they are accompanied by a message that says “just to make sure you’re human,” or something similar. Other times they are audio recognition captchas, where users must listen to a voice say a common word and type in that word. The idea behind all captchas is that humans can interpret them, but computers cannot.
The Captcha Cons
1. Captchas will not stop all spammers.
There are plenty of malevolent people in the world that will spam websites personally, rather than use a computer. People cannot be stopped by captchas. There are also people that make money by helping computers to Interpret captchas. They are described as data entry jobs and the employees type the numbers and letters that appear in the captchas in order to help spammers.
2. Captchas are annoying.
Let’s be honest, people do not like having to enter captchas. Some of them are really hard to decipher, which can make simply signing up for a website a hassle. It will turn some website traffic away.
3. Visually impaired users cannot read captchas. They may have computers that will read every word on the page for them, making it easier to surf the web, but the computer cannot read the captcha for them.
The Captcha Pros
1. Captchas work most of the time.
There are exceptions, like those above, but captchas do work most of the time, generally speaking. High volume sites will benefit greatly from captchas. They are the most likely to be targeted by spammers and therefore losing some traffic due to the inconvenience of captchas may be worth it.
2. Captchas are easy for the webmaster.
They are fully automated images, meaning that the webmaster simply has to implement captchas on their website and then they are set. It is one of the simplest ways to cut back on spammers.
The big con here is that captchas may make websites lose some of their traffic. This goes against everything that the webmaster wants. But the big pro here is that captchas do work the large majority of the time.
Do the pros outweigh the cons? Maybe. Probably, for large and popular websites. But small websites should probably stick to a simpler way of keeping out spammers, like email confirmation. Users generally get less annoyed with email confirmation than they do captchas, and they still help cut back on spammers. Ultimately this is a decision that only the webmaster can make.
Sam Mauzy is a blogger with a background in helping clients improve their ecommerce conversion rate.
