Captcha: good with spam
Yes, all right, I made a joke based off the fact that spam and Spam share the same name. I have no idea why that is, I’ve never bothered to research it, but what I do know is that I love Spam, and I hate spam. I know that I am not the only one who hates spam. The constant barrage of spam emails and comments can be a royal pain at times. The scale of the Internet means that the old tactics of bombarding areas with leaflets and letters evolved in very short order when email was created, and in no time at all, our inboxes became flooded with adverts for everything from dodgy dealings with Nigerian Generals wanting to deposit millions of dollars into your bank account and drugs to ensure that your marriage always remains… exciting? Lets stick with exciting. It’s not just scams and more scams though. Companies with a slightly less than ethical marketing department make “good” use of spamming techniques, sending emails to every account they can possibly find, using bots to post hundreds of comments on hundreds of blogs every day.
The junk box that you find on every email account is the defence against spam emails; by and large the filters attached to the junk folder ensure that you don’t end up with hundreds of emails cluttering up your inbox and hiding all the important stuff. Obviously, the filters aren’t fool proof, so you’ll have to clear out the trash once in a while, but fortunately that’s not usually very often.
The defence against blog comments spam is something called Captcha. It’s a type of challenge-response test that makes sure, basically, that the user who is submitting information to a form or page is human, and not a bot. There are quite a few different versions; the one we use for our contact form is just 4 letters and/or numbers. There are more complex versions that give you two words, distorted so that pattern recognition software can’t translate them and displayed as a simple image so that text readers can’t translate them either.
The impact that the Captcha system has had on spam on blogs and websites is incredible. There are very few ways round it, and the the beauty of it is that it is very unobtrusive. It’s such a simple system that people don’t tend to even notice it. It’s an ideal solution to an ever growing problem, and every web site that has any sort of automated user comment or contact system should be using it.
