This is by no means a new post (May 2006), but it’s still relevant. Nobody likes CAPTCHAs. It can be hard to decipher the letters and they’re annoying. They help keep the spam down though.
Well, there’s a better solution than forcing people to enter twisted letters and numbers into a form. JavaScript. The modern web pretty much doesn’t work without JavaScript, so people have pretty much stopped turning it off (the few that do are wackos who wish the web was still the way it was back in the days of the MOSAIC browser).
Safer Contact Forms Without CAPTCHA’s
15 Days of jQuery’s tutorial teaches how to implement an interesting technique that uses JavaScript to generate unique strings that are verified in the form processing script on the server. If the strings are null or false, the script denies the client access. It’s not foolproof, of course, no anti-spam solution is, but it’s a great deterrent, and a far less annoying one than CAPTCHA.
