We all know what spam is and might have already discussed lot about it. But, did you ever face spam which directly impacted your revenue and user experience? I have experienced that. I used to work for an online portal in which users can post their comments, new topics, etc. One fine day series of spam attacks occurred and the site became literally unusable and had to be taken offline. We had to cleanup all that mess and to prevent such attacks, introduced a captcha in all the places where user submissions are taken.
The topic that I want to discuss here is the effect of captcha on the site. Is it all positive or does it have some negative effect as well? This article explains in detail that users don't always like captcha and it drives away considerable number of genuine users.
Fortunately, it also points to a simple solution - Honeypot CAPTCHA technique. Phil Haack suggests use of a blank hidden field (using CSS) which will be ignored by real users but would be filled by the bots. I liked this idea and would surely use it in future.
Did you have any experience with Spam Attacks and Captchas? Share your suggestions/experiences by posting comments..
No comments:
Post a Comment