Sometimes on the web you’re just thinking “Why the heck didn’t I have that idea?” and that’s just what happened when I read this article on CNET. Everybody should already be familiar with the CAPTCHA concept and I recently had to enter a CAPTCHA code for three times because the first two were simply non-decipherable. Actually that problem occured on a Google page.
I have developed my own custom CAPTCHA about two years ago where you have to identify the male person on the image and enter the corresponding code under the face with some random parameters added:
However Google’s method is superior yet so simple because they only rotate an image. Rotation can be detected by a human easily yet not automatically by your usual automated spam bot. Maybe I’ll change my CAPTCHAs to this method as well - even far easier to implement.
The full details of Google’s new method can be found in this PDF file.
It seems that when you use these methods to fight spam, you also end getting less comments. Is it because people don’t want to be bothered by extra steps to comment?