One of the main points of reCAPTCHA is to help digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Everytime you use reCAPTCHA, you're helping in this effort. I agree this is a nice alternative if it works for people not using reCAPTCHA but it'd be nice if more people would also use reCAPTCHA on their sites. Yes, it's free.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha</a>
This won't work. The puzzle possibilities are limited.<p>This is about as effective as asking a random question, it stops bots because they don't know how to deal with it. It wouldn't have a chance against a targeted spam campaign/attack.<p>It's cute though.
This may not be such a great alternative — it allows far too many attempts which make it susceptible to cracking. (a video showing this being beaten by a bot [1] was posted on HN [2] last week)<p>[1] <a href="http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/" rel="nofollow">http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-capt...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791</a>
Unfortunately I automatically associate this with "punch the monkey" banner ads and the like; if I saw it on a registration page I think I might skip it without thinking.
Here is a youtube video showing that some of the puzzles can be beaten pretty quickly through brute force. <a href="http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E</a>
First one I got was American-style pancakes, where I was supposed to put syrup and butter on it. Now due to partaking in way too much pop culture, I knew what to do. But while pancakes are pretty common, not everyone eats small, thick ones, stacked to incredible heights and thus is able to recognize them. Never mind the syrup, which is basically as international as a PB&J sandwich.<p>That's the problem with iconography in general. Easily outdated or subject to i18n goofs.
Some critical limitations:<p>- Limited puzzle possibilities, making it possible to manually code a simple solver for each specific problem<p>- culture-specific puzzles (I got "how to make pancakes") will cause some confusion among non-US users<p>- more time-wasting & confusing (and therefore more annoying) than Captcha<p>- relatively heavy to load
First of all, technically this is a CAPTCHA still.<p>Second of all, you can eliminate the vast majority (or sometimes all) of your spam using honeypots much simpler CAPTCHAS like "what is four + 2?".
Ineffective at preventing bots and also ineffective at letting humans through reliably:<p>Good luck to those with accessibility needs (elderly, blind, etc) in catching those moving glyphs...
No more vegetarians visiting your site (after all if they don't put pepperoni on their pizzas they must be robots...)<p>The bot-writers meanwhile can write code for each puzzle (the puzzles, requiring art assets, are expensive enough to generate that the many spammers can out-muscle the few areyouhuman puzzle-setters)
The solution to captcha annoyance is not more annoyance in the form of a spammy-looking game. You can get to 99% of the use cases using some simple javascript logic and a hidden form element that is invisible to the user and catch the rest using a solid spam-detection algorithm on the server. The solution to spam is not to annoy your users. At least reCAPTCHA helps transcribe books…
I have mixed feelings about captchas.<p>As someone who works in tech, I realize it's a somewhat effective solution to a very difficult problem, but as a user, I just hate them.<p>Captchas are like the "customs check" you have to pass to leave a Best Buy. Because of a few bad apples, everyone's customer experience suffers a little.
Interesting idea of challenging people/bots to complete higher-level tasks to prove they are human. This just needs keyboard accessibility (I couldn't tab to the start button or handicap symbol link).