"Are You Human" Tests Go To the Dogs, and Cats

A new "are you human" test uses easily discernable photographs to protect comments and product reviews from eager spam bots, offering an effective replacement for third-party solutions like reCAPTCHA.

Many spammers use programs or bots to automatically fill out comment or product review forms, and then add links to malicious or scam sites designed to either infect or bilk users. To fight this sort of spam, some developers and designers use third-party solutions like the aforementioned reCAPTCHA. But for the most part, these would-be solutions are nearly untenable, since they are generally unintelligible even to real humans, a significant hurdle to accessibility, and relatively easy to hack.

AnimalCaptcha

BackWritten's solution to at least some of these captcha challenges is to use public domain pictures of dogs, cats, and other animals to test a user's humanity.

Preview Animal Captcha

The solution is implemented using JavaScript and server-side scripting. So it will be generally safe, although it could be vulnerable to some forms of brute force attacks, packet sniffing, or code reviews.

Easier to Read

While AnimalCaptcha would certainly not make sense on all sites, it would be an excellent choice for merchants in the pet space or merchants that otherwise have a customer base that would consider the images to be cute.

Regardless, it is far easier to read than more traditional, text-based captcha solutions.

Accessibility is Still a Problem

Like all image-based captcha techniques, AnimalCaptcha is a problem for site visitors using screen readers or other non-standard browsers. In fact, it is for this reason that accessibility-minded developers tend to avoid any sort of graphic-based humanity test.

If you decide to implement AnimalCaptcha, consider adding an alternative for visually impaired users.

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