What's the current state for captchas? (negative or otherwise)

Hi -

I've been a content user of Recaptcha for a long time. Recently I've been getting complaints that it's failing. I don't think it is, but it does appear that it's getting harder to answer correctly. In any event, it's time to switch.

There's Q&A options, there's negative captchas, there's tricks with dynamically changing field names, etc...

I was hoping to save myself a little bit of googling and get caught up to date by riding on your coat tails :slight_smile:

So... if you've been down the road of using a captcha that isn't a garbled image, what did you use? How did it go? And all that jazz.

Thanks folks!

-philip

Personally I use a very simple field that asks "are you a spambot?" hint say no, This seems to eliminate 99.9% of all comment spam on my blog, as spambots are not smart enough to say no, however it does not stop a human spammer.

I also really like this Rack Middleware, https://github.com/sunlightlabs/rack-honeypot which tricks spambots into filling in a hidden field. However I think it needs to use a field like url or email as most spambots these days leave fields blank that they do not recognize. This is nice as it stops spam but regular users don't need to do anything.

I have also written, and use, a simple Rack Middleware which looks for spambot patterns and blocks any IP address that sends a matching request, however it needs to be maintained as the various spambots out there change quite frequently. https://github.com/wolfmanjm/wolfmanblog_rails/blob/master/lib/rack/rack-spammers.rb