….That’s what I’ve determined empirically recently. Matt’s (WordPress prime mover) post here and this article in the Guardian mention the various failings of CAPTCHA.
It’s the kind of thing that’s dawned on me progressively and is the reason I don’t use Captcha any more. I’ve tested it and in the WordPress plugins that use it, I drop the option. Part of the reason, initially, I admit, was because I couldn’t get it to work reliably across all my sites….
Because of software complexities and interactions, anyone who’s done this lark for a while knows the infuriating oddities that spring up with software, just when you least expect it!
So my modus operandi is to try lots of stuff (plugins etc), and any that have the slightest problem, slowness or irregularity get seriously looked at for 5 minutes, and if it’s un-solvable in that time, I ditch it!
As I said, the Captcha stuff came into this category, but simultaneously, I noticed subtle changes in the way and content of the various forms of spam reaching me.
Plugins that are actively monitored by their authors are also modified regularly as well (unless they were very good when they first wrote it!). I’ve noticed something similar along these lines recently with a big splurge of almost daily updates from Akismet and Wp-SpamFree. This suggests that the goalposts are moving rapidly currently, some of which I’ve mentioned in earlier posts like probable-ddos-attack-using-sql-injection-on-my-websites/, or false-invoice-e-mail-spam/ say.
Despite the Captcha problems Sabre is still good at blocking the false registration bastards.
And the basic Captcha priciple is showing really good humanitarian use as I mentioned here, another-positive-use-for-the-computer-to-human-interface/. Ironic really – one does bad, one does good.