On CAPTCHAs
Mari is decidedly against the use of CAPTCHAs (short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) on any blog’s commenting section. Mari is often the victim of cruel CAPTCHA rulings.
It’s sort of demeaning to be told you can’t add or that you can’t spell. It’s like telling your visitors that they’re stupid. Mari says, the problem is NOT the user, but the CAPTCHA. They’re just plain stupid. Some of them you honestly cannot read. Some of the math ones, they expect you to remember GEMDAS from highschool (which, honestly, not many people do once they’re out of high school), or even better, the plugin errors.
All a site owner does by installing a CAPTCHA is prove that they are ignorant of Akismet. Now, Mari is aware, not everyone uses WordPress or one of the other blogging softwares that has an Akismet plugin, but for the most part, if someone is skilled enough to write their own blogging software, they are skilled enough to find SPAM protection. Akismet is MINDLESS to install. It comes with every WordPress install .zip downloaded from WordPress.org, and any “one-click installation” service worth its salt will include it too. The only things you actually have to do are activate the plugin, and then head to WordPress.com and get an API key. You do not need a WordPress.com blog to use Akismet.
Here’s an example of the plugin erroring. Now, Mari was assigned to comment on this site, and Mari sees it has a math question. Mari says to herself, “Okay, no need to start nagging yet. Maybe this math question works.”
Everything looks good, right?
Yeah, uh, even Mari’s scientific calculator says 10+3=13. Point is, these plugins do error. All it does is tick your visitors off. It’s not protecting you from spam anymore. It’s “protecting” you from normal comments.
Now, Laura, visitors, don’t get Mari wrong, the site is great, but the plugin choice is flawed. Mari doesn’t meant to say TechNewb is a bad site or anything. It’s quite nice, it’s simply the most recent example of what Mari’s talking about.
If you have spam problems, Akismet will most likely take care of all of them for you. It has caught over 5,000 spam comments on this blog alone. When Mari started getting over 20 spams a day, Mari installed Spam Karma 2. SK2 is a lifesaver if you find Akismet just can’t handle it alone.
Please, whatever you do to combat spam, don’t punish your visitors. You can turn on comment moderation and even use Bad Behavior if you’re really getting bombed, but please stop annoying your visitors. No more CAPTCHAs!
Blogging, Online, Rants, Tips 
17 August 2007, 00:13
against captchas, akismet, bad captchas, be nice to your visitors, captchas, hate captchas, love akismet, spam protection, use akismetYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I use only Akismet because Akismet is love.
I don’t like SK2 though. Mostly due to the annoying bug that caused my comments to be held. *grumbles*
I do use Captcha for my contact forms though just because it’s simple to install and is already implemented in the script I use.
@Maria
Yeah, SK2 can have problems until you read through 20 pages of documentation to find out how to permanently whitelist people.
Well, in contact forms, it’s more acceptable. Contact forms are easily susceptible to spam.
Wow, Emz has been thinking about CAPTCHAs too recently!
And how SHE hates them too!
Emz personally uses, and loves Akismet and doesn’t understand why WP users don’t use Akismet too.
Emz finds the math CAPTCHAs demeaning and annoying. Why must her brain continue to be tested? Surely robots can do simple math too anyway?
Emz wish CAPTCHAs weren’t used for comment protection. Emz rarely understands what they are saying, and has a stoopid way of seeing everything different from normal!
@Emz
It must be that you have to sign up. Some people are THAT lazy.
And robots can pass CAPTCHAs! There’s a constant war between CAPTCHA makers and spambot makers to make the CAPTCHAs unreadable, but then someone makes a spambot that can read it.
I have both SK2 and Akismet installed on my blogs plus I have comment moderation now enabled. No spam at all!
I personally hate CAPTCHAs as well. There have been times where I honestly felt a bit miffed and insulted when I got a message saying I didn’t pass math or something to that effect when I clearly put the correct answer in. Then there are the word image ones where they are so twisted, deformed, or have lines and what not obscuring them so badly I can’t read what the special phrase is to type it in. Hlaf the time they don’t have an option enabled to listen to what is written or it doesn’t work properly.
To top it off, most of the time my comment is no longer in the textbox and I have to retype the damn thing all over again. When that happens, people with that kind of spam protection usually get a message from me along the lines of “well I had a really nice comment for you but your CAPTCHA plugin is flawed and resulted in the erasure of my comment. So to summarize…” and I’ll just make some short notes and that’s it. Forget leaving nice and helpful comments I have better things to do then sit there and try my luck on their comment form.
@Joana
At least on sites like Google there’s usually an audio option if the CAPTCHA is that stupid. On blogs that use CAPTCHAs, there is no alternative.
Mari uses Opera, which caches everything, and goes back and puts her comment in a text file so she doesn’t lose it while fuming in her next comment about how the owner needs to install Akismet and they’re only hurting their visitors. And Mari does get really ticked off when she has to retype her comments, and types the exact same thing almost. XD
Oh wow. I never knew…well I was once thinking about getting CAPTCHA when I was interested in installing Cutnews. BUT since I have Wordpress now the thought definitley ran away from me. I am lucky in this situation, I have no spam whatsoever and love it! Probably because I have a small site with no affliates. But anyway when the time comes to protect against spam, I will definitley get Akismet, thanks Mari!
@Christina
Surprisingly, many people don’t know that CAPTCHAs suck.
No prob.
[...] Deleting comments you don’t like is the rudest possible answer. Mari strongly advises you not to delete any comments ever unless they’re caught by Akismet, or attack your other visitors without any intelligent thought. How to deal with attacks directed toward yourself will be explained in a post next week1. Deleting a comment is saying that person is not valid. That they are stupid. And that’s just another method of insulting your visitor. [...]