I really really hate captchas, and not only are they absolutely everywhere now, I mean I find myself solving a captchas every few minutes or so of staying in the internet, but they are getting impossibly difficult to solve. Some examples of things I've seen recently upside down words, Chinese characters, Greek characters, other strange alien-looking characters, completely unintelligible smudges. This is getting beyond annoying, this is just ridiculous. I think I'm going to find and work towards breaking all captchas once and for all.

Is there really such a great reason for this s*** ? I mean aren't there other better ways of detecting spam bots ? Like analyzing traffic patterns, user agent string, and things like that ? I am convinced that captchas are not the right solution, and I will fight against them as much as I can.

I agree, the captchas are annoying. On some sites, I've had to cycle through a dozen just to find one I could guess at. I prefer the 'human tests', where simple word problems are presented, like:

"There are two birds and two stones. How many can fly?"

That's enough to stymie spam scripts, but takes almost no time to answer.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it is possible to "crack" captcha ... because my failure rate is rather high. Maybe when the failure rate of the cracking program becomes less than that of the human, then captcha will disappear.

Yeah, me too. They are a ******* nuisance.

j@p4neZ3 Kanji captchas are arriving to www anytime soon... LULLZZZ

Probably wouldn't make them any more difficult to decipher. LULLZZZ to you too.

I also dislike them. However, one breed is somewhat useful - apparently the words used are failed attempts by a scanner, so they ask a human being to interpret them to enable the scanning software to improve. No idea who is doing it or how effective it is, but if it is the case it is a little worthwhile.

Though, IMO, anti-spam software has evolved to a point where we don't really need them and they are just a PITA.

Tried captchas on the forum I run - didn't work at all. We had hundreds of spambot registrations.

In the end, we used a blacklist. Now we get one or two spambots a week.

yeah, captchas are annoying, what's more sad is that they are necessary, sigh i wish for the good old days before spambots were prevalent on the Internet.

I don't mind the concept, but in many cases the implementation is incompetently indecipherable.

Are they trying to be modern art or do they have a legit reason, such as protecting against some kind of robo-scanning architecture?

Yes, blacklists are a much better option, since most of these bots don't change their IPs.

Personally, I would have a system to monitor traffic, and automatically blacklist suspected spam bots (or ask accidentally banned users to send an e-mail to the admin if they are not spam bots and can prove it).