Waterfall Web

There has been a lot of talk lately (and rightly so) about the disadvantages of using captcha to stop comment spam.

I’m not a big fan. They’re often hard to read even for someone with reasonably normal vision.

“Is that a zero or the letter O?”

“Upper case C or lower case c?”

Others have suggested some sort of simple logic question, like asking “What’s 1+1″ and having the user enter a ‘2′ in a text box.

That might be better, but it also requires some thought.

So I noticed that on Slideshare they prefix a captcha device with the question, “Are you human?”

And it got me thinking, can bots deal with radio buttons? Can we ask a question like this?

<form>
Are you human?<br />
<input type="radio" name="Human"
	value="No" checked="checked" />
	No, I'm a spam robot<br />
<input type="radio" name="Human"
	value="Yes" />
	Yes, I am human <br />
</form>
</body>
</html>

Download this code: human_form.htm

I must admit I haven’t done any research, but I’m thinking:

1. If a bot doesn’t understand radio buttons it will skip the question and fail
2. If it does understand radio buttons, it will probably choose the first option and fail
3. It’s an extremely simple question for a human to answer and should be completely accessible.

Point 2 is probably the most contentious. I’m making a big assumption there.

Has anyone else tried this? Can anyone spot any obvious disadvantages?

Thanks to Schmeegs for this – a very simple, straight-forward was to get Apache/MySQL/PHP running on your Windows box.

EasyPHP. Worked straight away for me without having to do anything!

Any if you do need to customise it, a little interface makes that pretty simple, too.

Well, just when we had warm and fuzzy feelings towards Microsoft for the improvements in Internet Explorer 7, they go and flush it all down the loo.

If you have to create HTML email, you’ll be pleased to know that Outlook 2007 won’t use IE as it’s rendering engine any more. It uses… wait for it… Word! And we all know how good Word is at rendering and creating HTML! (Not!!!)

So instead of getting improved standards support in the next version of Outlook, we take about 20 steps backward instead.

Sheesh… what are they thinking?

Read more here.