Do You Need CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Developed and trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University, the job of this test it to know if it's a person or a computer trying to access your system or website. Read more about CAPTCHA at http://www.protectwebform.com/.

A CAPTCHA requests the user to take a test. Any user who provides the correct answer is considered to be a human. A very common instance of a CAPTCHA is to ask the user to key in letters from a distorted image. The sequence includes alphabets and numbers. If the user keys in the correct sequence, he is considered to be a human or else a machine. A smart CAPTCHA is pretty easy to implement. You can get the details from http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha.

Website owners have to guard against spammers yet they need feedback from the visitors to their site. Spammers are always on the look out to grab your email id and use it for various purposes without your permission. One option is that you can go in for automated programs, called bots, to let them scan your website and parse out your mail id.

If you want to keep bots from getting your information, consider a CAPTCHA. Once you put the CAPTCHA online, as someone wants to sign up to get access to your information they will have to type in the letters that are being shown in a distorted image (i.e. http://www.protectwebform.com/plugin_wordpress). If they can't, CAPTCHA knows they are a computer and will turn them away.

CAPTCHA can be said to be a program that has the capability to create tests which only humans can clear. The program is a fully automated program and no human intervention is required. Thus it is so much preferred by website owners. CAPTCHA has become very popular in the past few years.

The key to CAPTCHA is using it to stop spammers before they ever get access to your email. Once they have it, you have lost the game and they will be regularly sending you spam emails you don't want.

In other words, CAPTCHA not only prevents encroachment by spammers for commercial purpose, it also protects the systems that are gullible to spam like, the webmail services of Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. They also help prevent automated postings on online blogs. CAPTCHA helps in enforcing a usage policy and prevents any kind of deviation from the policy. This is required in case a service allows automated use but within a limit.

Attempts to make CAPTCHA handier, like the use of JavaScript, mathematical questions or simple questions requiring common sense answers have failed because either they cannot be automatically created or they can be easily split given the condition of false intelligence. So, the only security these CAPTCHAs provide is safety through obscurity.

Article Source: http://www.articles.ask-me-about.com

The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to find out more about his new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.