Our IT department are pushing for us to use CAPTCHA on the email form on our site, we are resisting because of the impact on the average user. For now we’ve said we’ll look at it again if spam becomes an issue. So far the email filters do their job and we only see a few spammy emails a day – so it’s at a manageable level.

The article, and the comments, give me some data to back up our view point, and some alternatives for the next conversation.

Captcha can be really helpfull sometimes though. For example loginforms, if the user enters the wrong password to many times. Instead of blocking ( something you might wanna do still but ) the user after X errors.

This is because the amount of background noise and word distortion makes it impossible to guess for humans. Just select “get an audio challenge” on their demo page: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

Honeypots don’t screw with screen reader users if you aren’t stupid about them. It’s a form input, meaning it gets a label (what? you don’t use labels? please stop building forms then), and like every good label it should tell the user what to do (go ahead and user-test: if people keep filling stuff in because they are conditioned to fill in inputs, then go ahead and tell them what to fill in and filter that out in the back). I use honeypots and they don’t block out screen reader users (unless they can’t read at all, in which case, they aren’t filling out my forms in the first place… so note: I’ve seen English honeypots (and English skip links) on non-English forms/pages. Lolwut).

The backend’s job is to filter the spam, not the client’s. I never understood this idea that filtering stuff on the client end was somehow good, secure, or worth the hassling of users. Kinda like expecting everyone to have Javascript running. Let’s go futher and assume everyone is running IE on Windows with the Flash plugin. After all, anyone who doesn’t clearly is too poor to buy your products anyway, so you sure don’t want your time wasted by those sorts of ruffians and scoundrels and crazy paranoid Stallman types, lol.

Anyway except for the jQuery bull, excellent article. I fight CAPTCHAs every day, but I bother less and less. WebVisum plugin for the win.