Comments on: Involvement Device Captchas http://seoontap.com/web-writing/involvement-device-captchas.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=involvement-device-captchas Fri, 24 Sep 2010 18:52:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: IttyBiz (Naomi Dunford) http://seoontap.com/web-writing/involvement-device-captchas.html#comment-43 IttyBiz (Naomi Dunford) Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:45:36 +0000 http://www.damongudaitis.com/?p=55#comment-43 Holy hell, this is brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/c6awkk Holy hell, this is brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/c6awkk

]]> By: Damon http://seoontap.com/web-writing/involvement-device-captchas.html#comment-45 Damon Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:13:55 +0000 http://www.damongudaitis.com/?p=55#comment-45 @Dave Sherohman I totally agree that you can't be too obvious. Direct response copy makes me cringe and I think it makes a lot of web savvy people cringe. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from it. It's been around much longer and it's been continuously tested against the goal of selling. If you're able to educate the visitor and the rest of your site doesn't look like a sales letter, then I think you can get away with it. But don't trust me. Test it. Finally on the subject of spam bots. I don't think it's worth it to write a custom spam bot to beat a single custom CAPTCHA. Spam needs to scale. @Dave Sherohman

I totally agree that you can’t be too obvious. Direct response copy makes me cringe and I think it makes a lot of web savvy people cringe.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. It’s been around much longer and it’s been continuously tested against the goal of selling.

If you’re able to educate the visitor and the rest of your site doesn’t look like a sales letter, then I think you can get away with it.

But don’t trust me. Test it.

Finally on the subject of spam bots.

I don’t think it’s worth it to write a custom spam bot to beat a single custom CAPTCHA. Spam needs to scale.

]]> By: Dave Sherohman http://seoontap.com/web-writing/involvement-device-captchas.html#comment-44 Dave Sherohman Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:56:27 +0000 http://www.damongudaitis.com/?p=55#comment-44 Interesting concept, but I think you're underestimating the public's resistance to advertising (or perhaps I'm projecting my own resistance and overestimating the public's as a result). If presented with the captchas suggested in this article, I would just pick a red word at random and type it in without reading the question. The need to highlight which answer(s) are right would also quickly defeat its purpose as a captcha. If I wanted to spam a site using those, it would only take a few minutes to update my spambot with code to pick out the red (or otherwise highlighted) words and submit one of them as the response. (I do software development so, if I were involved with the spam industry, I'd be writing my own spambots.) Interesting concept, but I think you’re underestimating the public’s resistance to advertising (or perhaps I’m projecting my own resistance and overestimating the public’s as a result). If presented with the captchas suggested in this article, I would just pick a red word at random and type it in without reading the question.

The need to highlight which answer(s) are right would also quickly defeat its purpose as a captcha. If I wanted to spam a site using those, it would only take a few minutes to update my spambot with code to pick out the red (or otherwise highlighted) words and submit one of them as the response. (I do software development so, if I were involved with the spam industry, I’d be writing my own spambots.)

]]>