If you want customers, don’t use captchas!
In my last blog, I outlined why Captchas are pretty much the only way to tell if the comment (or anything else) submitted was done by a machine or by a real person. They are a neat solution, and they work well (for now). There are a couple ways around them, but I’ll explain those in another blog.
Today I’m going to explain why Captchas are bad, and why companies shouldn’t use them.
Like a lot of people, I hate captcha’s. The really good ones are really hard to read, so are hard to get right, even for a human. I don’t mind so much when I’m joining a free service, or posting a blog comment. But when I attempt to communicate with a company that wants (or even worse, has) my money, I feel like they are saying “Sorry, you have to be this smart to do business with us.
A quick recap, Captchas exist to ensure that whoever clicked the link, or filled in the form, was human, not a computer (eg a spam-bot).
Captchas are needed if the information that is posted will become immediately accessible on the web, or if the information posted gives the poster immediate access to resources. The information accessible happens with blog comments, and forum posts, the access to resources is mainly with webmail accounts and forums.
Now if you don’t use Captchas, your two choices are become a spam haven, or manually go through each submission. Lets discount the first option, and work on the second. For a free service, having anyone manually doing something is just impossible. By definition, free services don’t earn that much money that they can afford to have a person who’s sole job is to go through all submissions. And if the free service does make money (Hotmail and Google mail presumably), their business model depends on users getting instant access, not having to wait for someone to click Approve.
So we’ve agreed (or at least I have) that Captchas are important, and okay, with free services. Now this is where we come to my biggest complaint. The company that has a “Contact Us” page which requires a captcha, or they offer signups with a credit-card, but you need to enter a captcha first. With a contact us page, the result goes to someones email box. I refuse to do extra work to communicate with a company that wants my money.
As for signups that require payment, then why would you ever care about bots that are willing to pay? If you get $5 for ever sign up, thats a heck of a lot of money if a spam bot is happy to pay. I’ll happily turn my website into a humongous spam repository if every spammer paid me $5 per spam.
So in the end, if you provide a free service, then you can use captchas, as I don’t expect someone to sit there and manually click Approve and not get paid. However if you want my custom, then you’d better not require me to do extra work, you get the money, you do the work and manually (or automatically behind the scenes) filter out the spam.
