Comments on: Are You Tired of Captcha?

By: Ben Snave

Ben Snave — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:33:38 +0000

I have also seen one where there were 5 checkboxes, and it said to check the 4th checkbox, maybe that could work too.

By: Ida

Ida — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:57:14 +0000

@Neurotoxine: Thanks for explaining things! You got some good thinking there. And feel free to rise the dead ones any day. (We all like zoombies don’t we?)

@Saboteur: An input with the type hidden would not work. Hidden suggest that this is a field that is not meant to fill in and no spam-bot would. So it would most likely fail.
The label is absolutely needed for accessibility reasons. Different people use the internet in different ways. What about someone with a screen reader or someone with CSS turned off?

@Peter: You have a point. As I mentioned in the text this solution doesn’t fit big highly targeted sites. If someone really tries they will most likely succeed with their spamming.
This solution is to get rid of the bots who are just running around targeting everyone with the same methods and I think it’s perfectly suitable for most small sites.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:02:52 +0000

Sounds like a cool idea, and judging by most of your comments it works! Though don’t you think if someone was trying to specifically spam your site they’d get around it? Captcha’s add that extra layer of security against bots (and unfortunately most humans) that invisible inputs can’t.

By: Saboteur

Saboteur — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:54:47 +0000

You could use input type=”hidden”. Then you won’t need the CSS. Also, the label tag isn’t really needed, is it?

By: Neurotoxine

Neurotoxine — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:12:21 +0000

I think (sorry for rising the dead…), the problem using Display:none is related to the function of Display. I mean, when you use visibility:hidden, the block or whatever your affecting is hidden but still is there in the DOM flow.

When you use display: none, the object or whatever, is removed from the flow of DOM so, sometimes, the scripts or another forms of manipulation that are not aware of these cannot find the element and failed on their work.

I’ve been involved a couple of times fighting with a none displayed object that didn’t want to behave. Changing to visibility hidden solved the problem.

By: Tommy

Tommy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:27:10 +0000

seems like the display:none; method don’t work. tried it out on one of my spam attacked sites – i’m trying absolute positioning now.

By: Tommy

Tommy — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:48:58 +0000

true, simon. maybe not the best approach on spam.

By: Simon Kjellberg

Simon Kjellberg — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:42:43 +0000

@Tommy: I guess it would work to look for strange “spamwords” but I don’t think you should rely on it. There are a huuuge amount of different spam-emails out there with different content and you don’t know what they contain. What if someone, a real person that is =), really wants to write to you about one of theese spam-like words you don’t allow? Then he/she won’t be able to send emails to you or post a comment on your blog if that is what they are trying to do.

By: Tommy

Tommy — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:51:50 +0000

hehe, true true. now there’s an validation, spamfield should be empty and the input field should contain something.

i’ve seen solutions where they search the input for bad words like “viagra” “enlargement” and so on.

Has anyone tried this? Does it work?

By: Ida

Ida — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:23:01 +0000

@Tommy: You definately need to validate!
Noone sends empty messages? That empty message could have been me. I’m a geek when it comes to web sites and I actually use to hit submit without putting nothing in the form-fields quite often when I visit a new site. I do this just to see how they solved the validation and if the error-messages seems useful to me. Sadly a lot of times the error-messages are far from useful and a lot of times, which scares me, I get a “Thank you for your message!”
NEVER assume something about the user. Remember the rule: “All input is evil until proven otherwise”.