Via Planet GNOME: “reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam”
From what I gather, they have come up with a way to combine the well-known anti-spam technique with one that helps train an OCR tool. That’s very clever and should win a prize or two for the idea alone. Unfortunately, it misses one crucial point: people hate captchas. They always did, and they always will. And for good reason.
It’s not just that a captcha is one additional, superfluous (from the user’s perspective) interface element to deal with. Which doesn’t just slow them down, but also discourages them from using the form at all. It’s also that this particular form element takes particularly long to fill out, as you have to read the image, which is time-consuming and error-prone, not to mention not a fool-proof method against spambots.
The main reason I used to use Did You Pass Math? and now use Negative Turing Test as opposed to a more traditional captcha image, sound recording or whatever is that neither of those are anywhere near as aggravating to deal with. Now you’re asking me to decipher two words? That’s just not gonna fly.
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