CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are necessary in the modern digital user experience.
Spammers seem to be all over the virtual place these days and for many 'Net professionals their activity is wreaking absolute havoc. XtremeTop100.com, for example, which relies on user votes to rank servers, recently noticed a series of rapid and suspicious spikes in rankings.
"The quality of our service depends on real votes, by real people. Unfortunately, we discovered that bots were abusing our site, to the tune of tens of thousands of attacks getting through our system each day," said John Palsson, creator of XtremeTop100.com.
The site managers obviously needed to curb the fraudulent results from bot-generated voting and tested a number of spam filtering services, including reCAPTCHA, but found that none could stop the tide of bots - that is, until they discovered FunCaptcha. What's unique and really interesting about the FunCaptcha solution is that it replaces standard CAPTCHA tests with interactive, quick mini-games to detect real humans and confuse bots.
"The immediate results of incorporating FunCaptcha were staggering, and we've seen the program hold up against a number of new attacks by determined hackers," continued P‚àö - lsson. "Today, we can confidently reward the servers players love most, rather than those who fork over the most cash to exploit the system through bot-based votes."
Website Magazine covered six rather innovative alternatives to the traditional CAPTCHA back in 2013. Is your website using a CAPTCHA? Share your experience with other Website Magazine readers by submitting a comment below.