You know those little things on web sites where it shows you two distorted words and you have to type them in to prove that you're a human and not a spambot?
I *hate* those things!
Sometimes I can't even read the two words.
I'm sure you hate them as much as I do.
But those things–which are called "captchas"–play a role in keeping spambots out, which is important for all of us. Spambots are *EEEEEEvil."
Of course, now many spammers are hiring humans in third world countries to do their spamming by hand, thus making captchas less useful.
I have to delete spam supplied by such humans all the time.
So the captchas are now somewhat less effective for their annoyance factor.
I've been trying to find a better solution, and I recently discovered that TypePad has an option that will let me get rid of the captcha without flinging the doors of the combox open to every spambot on the planet.
That option is to require an email address instead of a captcha, and I've decided to experiment with this option.
I hope the experiment pays off, because I want to provide as comment-friendly an environment as I can, which means finding a balance between preventing combox spam, which is no fun for anyone, and making it as easy for readers to comment as possible.
The email address solution may do that better than the captcha solution at this point.
When I posted a comment earlier tonight, as soon as I put my cursor in the email field, my browser recognized it as an email field and gave me a dropdown menu of some of my email addresses, so all I'd need to do is click one if I wanted to use it.
I don't know whether your browser will do that. The first time you might have to type the email address out, and then it might recognize it in the future.
Worst case scenario, typing an email address is easier than squinting to figure out two distorted nonsense words and then typing them out, so it looks like this should make it easier for folks to comment.
BTW, the email addresses are TOTALLY PRIVATE. Only I see them, and then only if I go looking for them, which I only do for a special reason. You can, of course, put in a phony email address, but I hope you won't because there are times I need to get ahold of someone who has commented.
I hope you'll try the new system out and let me know what you think!
Of course, if we get overrun by spambots, I may have to go back to the captcha, but I'm optimistic that won't be necessary.
Here's hoping!