SEOs can occasionally find ourselves guilty of focusing on just the following few things:
- Links
- Rankings
- Fun cuddly animals that Google keeps releasing from its algorithmic zoo
Quite often we are heard muttering that user experience isn't really our problem. We are all about the above three points. However, as the job of SEOs continues to become broader, requiring a greater number of skill sets, I think user experience is something we can all work on. Besides, surely if we focus some of our energy on this, we are going to end up with much happier users, which in turn will result in higher conversions.
There are various ways to work on improving user experience, and of course, conversion rate optimization also plays a part. Today, I want to focus on one specific part of user experience — CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) — and why I think they suck.
CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions
When you encounter a CAPTCHA, you are being asked the question,"Are you a robot?" It's like asking a customer who is about to enter a physical store, "Are you a thief?" before you allow them to walk through the door. So we used to flood our users with these "questions:"
And from there we have now moved to this:
Literally every time I see one of the above it makes me wish that this was on a nearby wall:
CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers
Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote a great post on CAPTCHA's effect on conversion rates. He highlighted the fact that with CAPTCHA turned off, a company's conversion rate would increase by up to 3.2%. It's worth noting that the CAPTCHA type used in this test was based on the more traditional word format. That 3.2% is a pretty big potential gain for a whole lot of companies.
Traditional Word Format CAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem
At the beginning of 2013 it was announced that Ticketmaster was finally ditching its traditional CAPTCHAs. Ticketmaster proceeded with an alternative system by SolveMedia. The system presents users with an image or video, the user then has to type a phrase associated with that image. In the video version of the product, a descriptive phrase will appear which the user then has to copy into a box below. If they are not willing to do this, they need to watch the video for a certain amount of time (similar to YouTube advertising) before continuing.
Right now, companies are producing variations of novelty products aimed at helping us to stop spam from landing in our inboxes. Many products claim they are aimed at improving the user experience by making this easier for humans. They come in a variety of styles, ranging from completing a simple sum to those that are image-based or even gamifying CAPTCHAs (such as Are You Human).
Yet all of these "solutions" create the same problem. I, the user, am trying to complete a purchase, fill in a form, or even just submit a comment. And you, the website, keep putting this frustrating technological barrier between myself and my goal, just so you don't have to sort through a few items of spam.
Another major concern is that these products aren't particularly user-friendly for those who are blind or partially sighted. Some simply offer the same audio CAPTCHAs (and problems) that we have been experiencing for as long as we remember.
CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users
The key difference for me with image-based products such as SolveMedia and Minteye is that they seem to act as another opportunity to push an advert in front of users. In some cases they force you to watch an advert just to progress to the next page.
Users don't want to see adverts even when they are "subtly" placed around a beautifully designed page. Yet, more and more we are moving away from giving the user a choice about viewing an advert to the point where adverts are forced upon them (ahem...YouTube).
So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?
Despite statistics like those shared by Casey Henry, the fact is that the use of CAPTCHA is actually on the increase. Perhaps for many webmasters this is just becoming common practice, almost the norm. After all, it's a quick fix that means we, as webmasters, no longer have to worry about dealing with spam.
Figures from Drupal's usage statistics show that they alone have nearly 200,000 people using one of their variants of CAPTCHA. This is a barrier to a more fulfilled user experience that doesn't seem to be going away.
https://drupal.org/project/usage/captcha
"CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines"
...according to a study carried out by Stanford University into the use of CAPTCHA by humans. Yet, by testing more than 1,100 people, gathering 11,800 completed surveys, and studying 14,000,000 samples from a week's worth of data from eBay, they revealed just how difficult CAPTCHA has become for humans.
The study showed that, on average:
- Visual CAPTCHAs take 9.8 seconds to complete
- Audio CAPTCHAs take much longer (28.4 seconds) to hear and solve
- Audio CAPTCHA has a 50% give-up rate
- Only 71% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of a CAPTCHA
- Only 31.2% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of an audio CAPTCHA
With around 1% of the audience currently using audio CAPTCHA, this is potentially a huge market to lose.
So what is the solution?
There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA. For some sites, it may be unavoidable. However, any solution that is extremely effective rapidly becomes widely used, and as such, becomes a target for hackers.
There are some really simple solutions already out there that will help to reduce the amount of spam you receive but won't interfere with your user experience.
Akismet
Akismet provides an effective defence that has no impact upon your users. It comes as a variety of plugins and is generally easy to implement on your site. Akismet monitors millions of sites, constantly learning new methods to beat comment spam.
The honeypot technique
Essentially, the honeypot technique is used to hide a field on a form from the user. If this field is then filled in, the chances are pretty high it was by a machine. The major downside to this method is that the form could be accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be useful to also label the field with something such as, "If you are human, don't fill in this field".
We still ultimately have the problem that whatever we do to ensure a user doesn't fill in the form, a malicious script could perform its own interpretations by learning which labels mean that a field should be left alone.
However, the key benefit to this method is that the user isn't getting punished by being asked to complete something that is irrelevant to their actions.
Is it time you ditched your CAPTCHA?
I think we need to focus on what creates a better experience for users by asking ourselves the following questions:
- Is the amount of spam you are receiving really worth potentially losing conversions?
- If the answer is yes, is your CAPTCHA friendly to all users, including those who are visually impaired?
- CAPTCHAs are for robots, not for humans. Unfortunately, anything one person can code to try and prevent robots from entering a site is something another can find a way through. The real consideration is, are we just shoving our problem with spam onto our customers?
When it comes down to it, CAPTCHAs lead to a negative experience on our sites. They frustrate users, damage conversion rates, and they are not particularly friendly to visually impaired users. Most of all, it is shifting our problem onto our users. That's definitely not right. Getting rid of CAPTCHAs will not only improve our users' experiences, but it will also improve the web as a whole. This should be the beginning of the end of the CAPTCHA. If you have a CAPTCHA, I urge you to remove it now!
What do you think?
Image credits
https://gizmodo.com/5980361/ticketmaster-is-dumping-awful-captchas
https://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf
https://www.maggiesnotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Bang_Head_Here_25.jpg
Agree with you Tim. Captchas do ruin user experience very badly. We have faced this situation with one of our client (owner of an eCommerce store). He used to have a captcha option to avoid spam orders and messages but that thing also decreased his conversion ratio.
As a solution to that, we added an extra field in the form which asks a user to solve a small mathematical problem (say, 2+6=?) and grab a chance to win a gift hamper. That way they (users) don't feel annoyed to these questions and we fulfill our purpose. We witnessed a decent growth in conversion ratio since then.
Agreed. Dice.com is a great example of this. They asks questions each time you apply for a job that are a mixed bunch of mathematical or generic one's like - What is Carol's name?
I've seen a few like that where its a basic math problem... I prefer those far more than the captchas that make no sense.
I use the Really Simple Captcha plugin for WordPress and it presents easily readable letters and numbers that take a few seconds for users and still block SPAM. I tried the honey pot technique and if failed pretty miserably for me.
Captchas are very frustrating, particularly for older people with worse vision or non-technical people who don't understand things. I'd rather err on the side of caution and make it easier for customers to interact with a site and purchase and deal with a bit of extra spam rather than making it impossible for legitimate customers to purchase.
Totally agree with your post, I've done testing on this and back this up 100%
An easy workaround is to do a checkbox "confirm you are not a SPAMMER" which will cut down on so much SPAM.
This is easier as a consumer to click on rather than the Captcha boxes, making it a better experience.
The Title should be something like "YOU MUST CHECK THIS WE ARE FIGHTING AGAINST ROBOTS"
what about using a dropdown list? will that also cut down on bots?
Fun fact - a version of CAPTCHA, called reCAPTCHA, is actually being used by a company to improve their OCR technology so that they can then teach people how to learn new languages via a service called DuoLingo. So, I don't believe that all captchas are designed to be easy for humans. They give us the ones that the machine can't read so we can try to decode them for them :-)
It is definitely cool to see some of the uses of CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA technology (I know Google did some interesting work around numbers on houses from Google maps that they could not read: https://gizmodo.com/5897661/google-finally-puts-captchas-to-good-use) but I do still think that it presents a user experience issue and could definitely have a negative impact on conversions.
I certainly find them frustrating, particularly the ones you describe above that are often used to make machines smarter as these are often the hardest for a human to decode or recognise.
It seems to me that the only "smart" versions of CAPTCHA benefit the technology owner (or advertising platform) and still present a serious pain point for users. I suppose it is net positive to be making folks do something positive rather than just prove they're not a bot, but I certainly would welcome a solution that is less intrusive/frustrating and still provides security.
We tested this many years ago (to have a captcha or not to have a captcha) and found we were better off without it.
When we removed the captcha code from our websites, we did see an increase in spam but also saw an increase in leads.
However, on those occasions when spammers are targeting our websites it's so tempting to put them back in place.
Now days we find spammers target blog comments. To deal with this we remove the comment submission after a couple of days, which has greatly reduced spam.
I always believe if there is something I don't like about a website I use then I can't be the only I. I really do not like captchas, I either can't read them because of the text used or the colour, but too many of them simply do not work and I really love having my time wasted. The last thing I want to do is waste a potential customers time.
An alternative to your proposed captcha killers:
Checking the time used to fill out a form (e.g., <4 seconds to identify robots)
And a very elegant solution is to use two or three identifiers for robots, and to present a captcha after submitting and you identify a potential robot.
Good article. One might consider the cost to manually remove whatever spam is generated by not having the captchas. My guess is it will be pretty low. However its less of a cost issue and more of something that people dont think about changing when it comes to design.
Thank you Tim! I've been trying to convince my boss that everyone hates CAPTCHA for over a year now, and you've finally given me ammunition!
No problem. Alongside showing everyones personal dislike for them, I think it's important to show the potential impact upon conversions. If you still have trouble convincing your boss, try to pitch to him to split test and see the impact upon your own site. The conversion rates will vary dependent upon where Captcha is used and what its purpose is.
I usually stop a conversation when the capture isnt easy to read - yes google keywordtool I am using AdWords instaed. I really hate time wasting captures and it was time that someone write about that conversation killing factor of captures. I dont want to talk about audio captures - I am currently at work and dont have sound!
Audio captcha?
repeat.... what? (typing)... error
repeat... typing... error...
:)
Oh this is basically my current status with Nettuts+ Premium, they have a captcha not only for signing up in their site, but also for getting any of their plans. I tweeted them about the fact that their captchas were not working (through their support & and in the tweet) and no actions taken from their part.
Basically they are losing conversions for not checking up / solving their captchas. I'm pretty sure not many of their audience will be patient enought to try with another browser (6 days later after seeing no action from them).
I am banging my head just learning that captcha is not declining.
Nice post, I agree some Captcha codes can kill the conversion. I feel the ones where you have a quick sum to add up such as 5+3 always work well, I also notice a few sites using the drag the item to the matching pair recently but they take a bit. But yeah I wouldn't use audio or even the book scraped captcha codes they are very slow.
I think I must be at least part robot, I always struggle with those stupid things. After a couple of tries I often give up and go somewhere else that is easier to deal with.
I'd say it makes more sense to deal with a few spam instances than drive potential clients away.
While I'm on a rant, often I come across interesting links on Twitter that lead to a registration form (often complete with the evil CAPTCHA). Sorry guys, I'm really not that bothered about seeing your content, I don't care how earth shattering it might be!
Happy Monday!
I never liked CAPTCHA and I never installed it on any of my sites. Its to difficult to read and the longer you make the sales process the more oppertunity you give the customer to fall off. If its an email subscription I'm seeking then I ask for name and email 2 fields same for my clients that five estimates or whatever their serivce may be. Get the contact information you can ask the person all the other information in a follow up email...there is no need to collect everything at once. I think that is a common mistake I see on sites that are not professionally marketed. The contact forms can be up to 15 or 20 questions. Its ridiculous...get the lead and worry about the other details later once you have the person on the hook.
I totally agree with your post, specially "we are just shoving our problem with spam onto our customers". Since the web is changing and it demanding the USER'S SATISFACTION hence we should think about making something easier than the irritating CAPTCHA (if it is a must have). Some tricky questions and a timely change in those can solve the problem of both the website owner as well as users.
"we are just shoving our problem with spam onto our customers" I agree!
Using a form on your site that can help fight against spam zombies usually involves the use of some sort of verification that the user is human. I've seen my fair share of visually horrendous CAPTCHA images, but there are solutions out there that are user friendly and still protect you from getting spam emails. In my humble opinion, I would rather have CAPTCHA so that I don't get spam.
Using the check box that confirms that the visitor isn't a spammer works just as well when it comes to blocking SPAM. I personally think that this is a better route to choose compared to captchas. Captchas are just TERRIBLE.
Have the same opinion with you Tim. Captchas act mess up user experience extremely poorly. To make use of a captcha alternative to keep away from spam orders, information and messages, but that item also reduce conversion ratio.
Completely agree with your post
I have a B2B website with 'contact' and 'request a quotation' forms. When these forms were first implemented ~90% of submissions were spam so a reCaptcha was implemented. I agree Captchas are bad for UX, so a possible alternative for me would be to analyse form submissions server-side (after client-side form verification) and clean out spam by checking submitted form text against some regular expressions. Rather disappointingly a lot of my spam seems to contain 'SEO' which is not relevant to the B2B website.
So my question is: If I detect spam content in a form submission, according to the rules in my regular expressions, should I notify the user or just allow them to think their submission was a success (and bin the submission)?
Or, am I missing something dangerous with my whole premise?
Personally I would just let them think their submission was a success and bin it. Many of these bots would probably re-submit anyway, whether their application was a success or not.
Yes, for marketers captcha is not good but to prevent spam people have to use it.
Interesting points - but personally I love (re-)Captcha because it's a force for good as every correctly inputted code is used to digitise a book! https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html
Its the webmaster who has to take a call. Are forms are been filled by robots or spam bots. Is he getting too much impact on the site through spam forms
If yes - may be captcha is a solution for him. If Spam bots are not hindering on the site, may be yes captcha should be avoided
However, Akismet has its own drawbacks
Refer this from Ana - https://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/die-akismet-die/
Wherein even genuine human comments are marked as Spam by Akismet - which is even more dreadly.
The best captcha is one from a Dominican website, where you have 10 photos of dogs and cats, and have to pick out the cats. Argh...
As other readers have mentioned, here are the solutions:
1. Very easy Captcha! My understanding is that bots cannot complete even the simplest of captcha's, correct?
2. Complete the math equation (e.g. 2 + ? = 11 or 3 + 5 = ?)
3. I like the G.A.S.P. plugin that comes with CommentLuv and CommentLuv Premium. You check a box to prove you're human. Bots cannot check the box. Best solution of all in my opinion.
4. Or just use akismet, if you must. I heard it has a problem with false positives, though. What's the latest word on that, in your opinion? ( a 'false positive' is when it says it's SPAM when it's actually a legitimate comment!)
Thank you for this article! And for bringing attention to this prevalent, yet annoying issue!!! I cannot friggin' stand those stupid overly complex captchas!!!!!!!! You know, the ones you have to reset about 5 times until you can find the two words which are actually human readable!!!
~ Jupiter Jim
Captcha is irritating, but security is more important. I don't understand why the characters in the captcha are so confusing?
Absolutely annoying agreed. Interestingly Google's are the ones i struggle the most with, just one word but so squidged together I can never make it out!
Absolutely Agree.
As a workaround, we use very easy words which are easy to spell like city or country names or initials. For Example India, Japan, England, USA, Italy etc with IGNORE CASE and we can keep it easy for users to fill this while still keeping bots away.
Yeah, I can tell you how much I hate certain ones. For me, it's just frustrating when I can't read it and have to redo it a couple of times until the letters don't mold together too much.
I saw one CAPTCHA that is more like a game where you select like items such as a baseball, bat and glove without picking the basketball. It made the CAPTCHA a little fun while Keeping It Simple Stupid.
As far as the rates, I'd really like to see some hard numbers in different genres. The point that I'm trying to make is that I think it depends on the subject. Hiring an attorney such as the guy that commented before me is a very serious subject that probably takes a general amount of consideration prior to filling out the CAPTCHA, but if you have to fill out one for downloading a free game, conversions may be a lot lower, especially if the game is lame. You bring up some awesome points! Thanks for your time!
really helpful!
Captcha is annoying, but with all of the spam that is going on out there these days, it is necessary. We get hit hard with all those bots filling out our contact forms. These bots think that this is a comment form looking to drop their link on our site. If anyone as any idea to stop the bots from spamming our sites, I am all hears. Otherwise, we have to continue using captcha to block to bots.
This is a tough battle. I have two clients who are receiving more clicks and leads from their PPC and SEO (which is great), but a certain percentage is spam. They are getting frustrated with the spam. If we implement a CAPTCHA, we will reduce the spam and also lose out on some potential clients too.
No business owner wants to receive this, but sometime more leads will equate to more spam too. But, if you are indeed receiving more potential leads, this is a small short coming to have to deal with.
Message: %titlet% nike shoes https://www.abcde.info/ <a href="https://www.abcde.info/" title="buy cheap nike free">buy cheap nike free</a>
Desired Appt. and Time: buy cheap nike free
What are your thoughts?
Hey Tim,
We are running a web design company for past 9 years and we have learnt it by experience and by understanding the buyer psychology that your prospective customers are always looking for reasons to NOT TO buy from you and difficult to crack CAPTCHA gives them that reason :)
We keep easy to read CAPTCHAs on our programmed forms to keep spammers away and at the same time make prospective buyers feel easy.
I have noticed there are many really COMPLEX captchas, based on my understanding of the programming logics I believe another captcha should be programmed which asks user: Tell us what you see in this box
And in that box we can show them one picture which can be of a MAN or WOMAN or BABY or PANDA o PENGUIN or PIGEONE etc etc and we can ask user to select one of the options in drop down.
This is almost impossible for spammers to crack and easy to use as well.
Please like this comment if you guys find it useful.
I will talk to my team to program this captcha and distribute it publically for free if you guys would like us to build this captcha.
Regards
Manish
I love the clever captchas like 2+2 = ?
Bottom line we need more solutions to captchas
Depends on the form fields, but sometimes a captcha can save you headaches from multiple spammy submissions.
But how to stop spam? How website (or script) would know that's real person?
You want to take the risk of having a CAPTCHA on your website? Set up an A/B split test where you could compare the conversion rate between the page where you have the CAPTCHA and the one where you have not implemented one.
Instead, Use a simpler CAPTCHA. For instance, I’ve seen "What is the sum of 7 plus 5? Or give me a few words and tell me type the third word. Those are much easier for humans and damned near impossible for SPAM.
Excellent post. :)
Annoying, frustrating, and difficult to read is an understatement.
Let's take a step back and talk about the reason for including Captcha in the first place - prevent spam and bots. The goal should be to prevent spam and bots without preventing humans from signing up or signing in.
Not to say that you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater - you don't. What we should be asking ourselves is this...what criteria can I use to identify suspicious behavior? If we can answer that question, then we can design our sites to use Captcha in only these cases.
A site should NEVER include Captcha by default (imho). It should only be included if suspicious behavior is detected. For example, multiple attempts within a specified timeframe or after a specified number of attempts by the same user. It needs to be just as personalized as the rest of the site content - only show it when it's applicable.
A little bit of jQuery and a "click" event solves the need for CAPTCHA's in most cases. I don't even remember the last time we used a true HTML form with a method to process any input from the visitor. A great solution for Wordpress comments is the GASP plugin.
Personally I very much agree for not using captcha but there are much feasible solution available for captcha. we need bit creative which creating captcha so that the visitor do not get frustrated. For solving this issue, We have used shape captcha in all forms of our site & Client sites. From past one year we are not facing any decrease in conversions.
Examples:
https://www.techwyse.com/contact-us.php
https://www.adluge.com/free-trial/
The shape captcha solves the issue of SPAM to greater extend.
I could not agree more on the negative effect of CAPTCHA's on user experience and conversions. I either feel like I'm the customer being called a thief or that I'm actually going blind.
Even so, there are a number of other hidden dangers which reduce conversions in the name of greater security which will have a negative effect on conversions. Take the Moz Blog itself (great site sorry to name and shame). Asking for 2X email and 2X password for verification has been found to reduce less erroneous logins than it does drive away legitimate users. See James Mansfield's blog "Death to email re-entry" https://www.jamesmansfield.id.au/death-to-email-address-re-entry/
Autocomplete has all but killed email re-entry, perhaps the honeypot technique and analytics showing the dramatic effect on conversions will finally kill CAPTCHA.
Yeah? well, at least you help digitize books :)
Yeah I totally agree with this article. Fighting spam without using CAPTCHA is the best route to go.
Reload the CAPTCHA alone, if your visitor enters it wrong so he don’t have to fill in all the other form fields on the page again.
Totally Agree!! Captcha codes lower down the conversion rate. But it is also true that security is also important too and to eradicate the spam messages captcha code is used. I think that the mathematical sum like 2+8 are quite easy to deal with instead of the difficult and confusing alphabetical captcha codes.
You present some interesting arguments to ditch Captcha, and we do not use it. I visit a ton of sites that do and if it not something I have to use and input I generally leave the site.
It is annoying to have to enter the small funny looking letters. Sometimes after trying so many times it just locks you out. If i was the end user that really wanted to buy the product or get to know more informations about the product gets blocked by a CAPTCHA; will cost the company money. Think of the product and is it worth having this kind of blockage.
Great article! CAPTCHAs drive me bananas. Another awesome alternative is https://areyouahuman.com/ - an engaging, compelling way to keep users moving through their content experience, while proving they are in fact...human.
I don't find CAPTCHAs particularly annoying as a field to fill in as part of a form. What I find annoying is not being able to read the image and having to continue to get it wrong or cycle through alternate images until I can find one that is easier to read. Why do CAPTCHA images have to be so hard to read? If they are an image, can a bot read the text anyway? Why not just make it an easy to read image and call it done?
Yes, basically.
If the image is easy to read by you, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software can read it very easily too. And probably faster than you, or me!
So, that's the real issue with Captcha. To be useful, it needs to be hard for a bot, and so is hard for a human.
Hello Tim
Nice Post, I Agree with you. Some time captcha codes create irritation.
I disagree--I think they always cause irritation :) I don't know anyone who looks forward to filling one out (except maybe those video game ones).
However, not all is bad. The efforts helps digitize books (via ReCaptcha):
"ReCAPTCHA takes its word images from scanned print materials. Every time people solve a CAPTCHA from the company, they are also, as a byproduct, helping to turn scanned words into plain text that can be indexed and made searchable by search engines."
I disagree with your premise. While the alternative solutions you have mentioned are worthwhile, you spend far more time disputing the credibility of CAPTCHA and far too little time extolling the virtues of other options.
For our clients we use CAPTCHAs on most conversion forms, because the spam influx is to great otherwise. Now, I think that if the conversion to fill out the CAPTCHA, versus the lost conversion who doesn't, means that the successful conversion is more valuable than the failed, which is why, until we find a better alternative, CAPTCHA is a good solution to spam.
I, like James, find each of them annoying, but at least the ones requiring me to do some math make me feel smarter than, say, a 4-year-old for a few minutes. .
I think the end of this post is where learn the truth about what is going on. Spam will almost always be there, it's whether or not the user gets to deal with the consequences. I can't even count the amount of times I have had to refresh a CAPTCHA because my perfect vision couldn't tell what the letters were.
Amen! I hate trying to decipher those things. There has to be a better way to do things. Thanks for the read.
Excellent post. Have seen the same loss of conversion on my sites however, the amount of spam recieved without them is intollerable. Loving the "hidden field" idea.
What are the odds of falling foul of Google rules on hidden content if you are using the 'honey pot technique'?
Should be no issue, as it's a form element hidden (set off-screen or as visible:none) by CSS normally. I.e. not hidden text and a very small item.
If you have a blog that you shouldnt realy be using capcha because the main purpose of it to protect you from spam and you can reduce spam by using different methods like using akesmet etc, I dont use captcha for my Blog and i have almost 0 spam.
Hidden fields is my choise. Great solution!!!
When CAPTCHAs were first released they were a breakthrough in detecting spam, but as you said above "Unfortunately, anything one person can code to try and prevent robots from entering a site is something another can find a way through." and that will always be the case. I mean, there are even programs and subscription services that claim to complete 70%+ of CAPTCHAs these days, and the remaining 30% can't even be solved by humans in the first place! It's a pointless way to try and combat spam in my opinion and couple that with the fact it drives conversion rates down, I see CAPTCHAs as nothing more than a pointless waste of time.
'There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA' Totally agree with this! Having CAPTCHA's when they are not nessecarry is not going to do anything but harm your conversion rates. For what it is worth you might as well not use them.
Great post!
I hate to see CAPTCHA, so I believe others don't like it too!
Another solution to stop spam is to add checkbox to your form and to ask user to check it (Growmap anti spambot plugin does that). It's easier to check one checkbox than to read and type unclear, warped CAPTCHA codes.
Rid, I say! From a user perspective, I have always thought of CAPTCHA as a huge hassle. I find the honeypot approach might have some potential. #spammerssuck
What a needed post, especially for ecommerce website that adds a captcha on the information submission page!
We all are facing SPAM and this is not new but one thing businesses need to decide before adding a captcha is that at the end of the day what they are looking for, a SPAM free inbox or a happy customer and answer will tell them their line of action!
Good read!
Summary -
Instead of CAPTCHA, use a hidden form field (hide with the CSS) in that if the hidden field is filled in, the form will not submit. You can do this validation on the front end with javascript or on the backend with PHP. We've implemented this solution 50+ times on clients sites and they are all extremely satisfied with the result.
"The major downside to this method is that the form could be accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be useful to also label the field with something such as, "If you are human, don't fill in this field"."
Thank you for this piece of knowledge.
My first initial comment to this is - thank goodness I'm not the only one who finds CAPTCHA annoying! In addition to the Askimet and Honeypot technique (Which I definitely am considering), I like to use the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. I found my spam on my blog being reduced by 95% when I installed this amazing plugin!
The less I have to do when I see one the better. I do like the "click this if you are human". To be sure there will be a work around on that too in time.
I am noticing more catcha boxes than ever before when on other websites these days. I don't have one on my website, but I may need one with the increased spam lately.
I had only just heard of the honeypot method the other day. That's one I'll be trying soon. In the last year or so, we went away from traditional CAPTCHA's and replaced them with the math-type questions mentioned in many of the comments. But in the past month, I've tried SweetCaptcha with good success on my blog. It is one of those solutions where you are told to drag a certain item to another item. It was free to implement in WP, and is easy to install and use, and so far has eliminated all spam.
I agree that captchas do ruin the user experience! I like using the simple math captcha but I still get spam. The problem is that spammers are able to I've heard of the honeypot method but haven't been able to implement in my forms.
Hello Tim,
Great stuff man! Interesting topic to be discussed. Honestly, I also hate "CAPTCHA,". It irritates and disturbs lot as per UX point of view. But I guess, it will be great, if this kind of 'CAPTCHA' should be replaced by any interesting brain teaser or more user interactive puzzle. Through which, real user engagement may increase.
Thanks!
It may lead to real user interaction, but we also have to consider how users will perceive these brain teasers. By introducing "new captchas" we are asking the user to change habits. They are used to one of two things currently.
All of a sudden we re-invent captcha to make it more gamified. Lets look at this from a UX point of view. You are looking to purchase a book and then all of a sudden you have to play a game based on putting keys into a door. The context doesn't quite fit. I'm sure many users would be like, "what is this?!?"
How about we just get rid of them full stop.
I completely agree, I have a website focused on gemstone jewelry and I use captcha codes on the site. It definitely does throw some users off. People hate having to type the cod in wrong, and then retry the code again. It is an annoying factor for a lot of people.
I personally hate captchas, however, after testing several other methods (including the ones you described) I found that captchas are the most effective. It ultimately depends where and when are you using them. For contact forms, I think it's the best option, in my humble opinion and experience. I've been using recaptcha for years now and found that you actually have to write exactly what it says, I guess they use some kind of percentage to pass or fail the challenge.
Personally I don't enjoy them :)
I think it can affect the user experience, however without adequate testing it is tough to verify. I am conducting a little CAPTCHA research and I am happy to share some stats of one client.
CAPTCHA was enabled on one attorney's landing page form at the end of June and it seems the number of leads have remained fairly constant in July (organic traffic has remained stable through the past 6 months). It has only been one month since this was enabled, so as the months continue I will see how this pans out.
Undoubtedly, a very nice post but I have a question. What would you do to stop spam if not using captcha and other captcha kind of things, especially HTML websites like ours?
FYI, we get around 500 spam emails every hour even after having captcha enabled on our website but yes it's very easy to read and fill...Can you suggest something please which is much easy for humans but not for hackers or spammers...don't forget we have an HTML website. Our website is rankingbyseoindia.com. Looking forward to your reply.
Thanks,
Lalit Sharma
Time for the honeypot!
If want you want to do is avoid spam on comments or form fields, just add some questions that humans can answer, like a checkbox that asks if you are human, or what color is Napoleon's white horse, the color of the sky is... or a select box asking what you are and you have several options (human, alien, dog, etc), and from there on, you validate based on the input provided (by doing a string comparison)
Yeah, they are an absolute pain to fill in.
I don't know if it still works or not, but typically on the two-word CAPTCHA forms - one of the words (usually the harder to read one) is actually fake and allows you type in anything as long as you match the other word.
So the CAPTCHA posted in the article with the numbers and the underscore followed by 'lawayino' would only need 'lawayino' typed in, the first word could be anything you wanted.
As I say, don't know if it works any more !
Truly awesome methods for verifying users! I was not aware of an alternative to CAPTCHA's so that is appreciated.
I can't stand captcha's. I understand the point of them but there has to be a better way
Great post. Who hasn't had a CAPTHCA show up before that shows a symbol and/or some letters? It's not typable and when you ask them to spell it out some gibberish comes out that you've never heard of.
Back to the point though, reasons like I stated above are great reasons why CAPTCHA's slow down conversions people get irritated and frustrated, and leave the buying cycle completely. We need to create better gatekeepers to monitor these tasks, instead of worrying about creating barriers.
Thank you for saying what we were all thinking! The CAPTCHAs with distorted script usually take me a try or two and I have 20/20 vision; I can't imagine how difficult it must be for anyone with impaired vision.
As a user, the version I find least frustrating is a simple question, e.g., 2 + 4 = ?. I've seen at least one site that added a note next to this explaining, "Just so we know you're not a robot!"
Very well written and one of the great post
Most of the times CAPTCHA irritates us. It is very easy when the website owner do not have any CAPTCHA process to complete any task. There should be any other rules and process for any confirmation and authentication.
Thanks
Yes annoying captcha