So It’s 2012 Why Do We Still Have Captchas?

It seems like every single other aspect of the web has evolved and or is constantly evolving but when it comes to stopping spam the immediate staple choice is a hard to read text or image captcha. Most of the time using hard to distinguish letters and numbers, abstract background shapes & patterns and sometimes hard to read colours.

Makes you really wonder if it’s the only way or there is room for a player in the market to revolutionise captchas. Even the Recaptcha service which gives you two words and helps Google digitise books throws hard to read words your way, well almost constantly.

Surely presenting a user with a grid of fruit that randomly changes order each time it is displayed and asking a user to “pick the red Apple” is no less effective than potentially pissing your site visitors off with nonsensical captchas that they can’t understand and if they don’t get it on the first or second time will give up and go elsewhere (except in unique cases like checking your Gmail account).

I’m currently working on the aforementioned captcha idea in my spare time, but wouldn’t be disappointed if someone else did it first if it meant I wasn’t asked to enter ridiculous captcha values. The basic idea is that there will be 2 or 3 different categories with 10 different choices which when displayed will be randomised to prevent guessing from bots. The categories I have in mind so far are; fruit, animals and transportation and there would be 10 different types of each displayed (as generically as possible).