What's the current state for captchas? (negative or otherwise)

Rails
1

Hi -

I’ve been a content user of Recaptcha for a long time. Recently I’ve
been getting complaints that it’s failing. I don’t think it is, but it
does appear that it’s getting harder to answer correctly. In any event,
it’s time to switch.

There’s Q&A options, there’s negative captchas, there’s tricks with
dynamically changing field names, etc…

I was hoping to save myself a little bit of googling and get caught up
to date by riding on your coat tails :slight_smile:

So… if you’ve been down the road of using a captcha that isn’t a
garbled image, what did you use? How did it go? And all that jazz.

Thanks folks!

-philip

2

Personally I use a very simple field that asks “are you a spambot?”
hint say no, This seems to eliminate 99.9% of all comment spam on my
blog, as spambots are not smart enough to say no, however it does not
stop a human spammer.

I also really like this Rack Middleware,

which tricks spambots into filling in a hidden field. However I think
it needs to use a field like url or email as most spambots these days
leave fields blank that they do not recognize. This is nice as it
stops spam but regular users don’t need to do anything.

I have also written, and use, a simple Rack Middleware which looks for
spambot patterns and blocks any IP address that sends a matching
request, however it needs to be maintained as the various spambots out
there change quite frequently.