Alex King had a great post last month asking people which they thought was more annoying, CAPTCHA or Challenge Response E-mail. The comments suggest that most people find email more annoying, assuming that the CAPTCHA weren’t incomprehensible.
Has anyone done any formal studies, watching regular users, to find out which one people find easier to use? Another factor to look for might be which one causes the most errors or failures to complete the process.
2 replies on “CAPTCHA versus Email”
I think captch is less annoying, as you see the alphanumeric data on the same page and need to enter it in the box.
But the email. You have to open a new window, login to your email account, click on the link, and then the comment is activated.
But I think email blocks more spam than captcha.
in reality it’s not versus its really a join of the two ideas.
Without a captcha posting automated comments would be to easy.
I could also easily write a cron job to check my mailbox … local system cat + grep + wget and visit the url’s to common blogs i want to spam.
CAPTCHA and Email now thats a nice concept. I plan on implementing this for non logged in users.
The captcha would be needed on initial posting of comment and after the user visits the url. to avoid a simple wget script.