My Own Ideas
Here's a few that I've concepted, but haven't put into production on any site yet:
Backwards
- Create the image using your language's text rendering features
- Encrypt the original word and store it in a hidden form variable
- Your validation script decrypts and reverses the original word to check for a match
This allows us to maintain the human readability, while throwing another obstacle at robo-spammers.
Shapes?
Using a similar technique as above, we could pass an encrypted version of the answer, or the actual shape in a hidden form variable.
Come right out with it
I am a Robot Alien Monkey Human Caveman Ghost
I honestly have no idea how this would pan out. It would give unfamiliar bots a run for their money, and maybe get a giggle out of your users.
What I'm trying to convey in the ideas above is that CAPTCHAs, which are always a nuisance for your user, could be made a bit more interesting, and easier to complete, with a little creativity.
Captchas are becoming more ridiculous by the days – it now takes me about 2 or 3 retries to get one of these re-captcha things right.
There must be some way – a much better way to prevent spam.
I just saw this one on a site:
In what year are we? ____________
This is great as it's dynamic, and the answer is easy to grab on the server side.
It's hard to resist commenting on my own post when I see an awesome new CAPTCHA. I just had the pleasure of using one that's actually an animation! As a very small video file, this CAPTCHA made it easy for human visitors to recognize the letters, as they were hardly distorted. Yet, there's no doubt that a bot would struggle to decode and recognize an alphanumeric pattern inside a video.
Another great one:
What is the largest number listed here – 12, 36, 14, 87, 22?