I don't know many people who like captchas; heck, I know plenty of people who don't even know what a captcha is.

For those who don't know, a captcha is that annoying image/graphic/word usually found beside the submit button and a phrase like "Please enter the secret code to prove you're a human." Do you ever feel less-than-human when it takes 3 or 4 tries to get the right answer?

Captchas are designed to block something people like even less - spam. But do they really work?

In a recent blog post, Tim Kadlec cited a W3C report that said "most captcha services could be defeated with 88%-100% accuracy by using some simple OCR." That was in 2005, but I doubt the numbers have changed much since then.

But we do what we can. We use captchas at VNet Consulting, but we are always looking for other solutions. When we find an alternative that works in our sites, we'll use that instead.

I welcome your comments on this article . . . if you can prove you're human.