Anyway, glad you didn’t find the reCaptcha too onerous!

@owen: yeah, i think having real words makes a huge difference. I’m a bit dyslexic and random strings of character are very hard for me.

Over all though, after talking to Luis I’m much happier with the idea of using reCaptcha permanently here. I get a lot of spam attempts on very old posts, and this should help slow that down.

I still hate captchas, though I do understand why you’d need to use one on a high-traffic blog )

These captcha thingies, though, are a pain in the arse, frankly. A good idea in principle but it’s not much bloody use if the security word is illegible. So many times I’ve given up because I keep getting the code wrong, so many comments gone unposted.

Then again, you may never get to read this comment if I can’t fathom out what code this ReCaptcha is asking me to type in…

(In general I loathe captchas because I fail at them so often. It’s frustrating.)

So: yes to reCaptcha!

Personally, I’d much rather have to authenticate somehow — for a blog, I’d expect that to be with a generic ID (probably OpenID, but Google or Yahoo! IDs wouldn’t pticly surprise me any more).

Baiscally, my objections are twofold, then — captchas are inherently poor accessibility and not-great usability, but also they simply don’t work.

Undortunately, though, I don’t have a better suggestion for how to defeat comment spam. I gather passing all links via Google makes a little difference (which I’m sure you’ll already know far more about than I), but I’d personally go for registration of some kind (not necessarily maintained by you).

“One of the words displayed by reCAPTCHA is from an old book which is being digitized. As such it is not graded – it cannot. Indeed, occasionally it may be blank, or just a bit of noise.

“On the word that is checked, the user is (currently) allowed to be off by one letter. It has been found that this increases the user experience while not degrading security by a large amount. This is tuned dynamically based on many factors.”