Here Be No Captchas
A couple of days ago David Pogue wrote about two of his pet peeves and although I have never encountered the first one (having to confirm you’re a real human being when sending a mail to someone by taking an online test), I do agree that captchas are annoying.
I do see why people would use them, but they’re irritating and user-unfriendly and an unwelcome interruption when you just want to post a sweet short comment.
As for the user-unfriendliness, some good examples on why captchas are probably not what you want to force your readers to deal with can be found on I Hate Word Verifications. There you can find a nice selection of unreadable captchas, a good showcase of about everything that doesn’t work with the concept in the real world.
I have been using Akismet to catch Spam comments for a few years now. As mentioned before I can’t tell you for sure whether it ate some real comments by accident, but my general gut feeling tells me that it’s doing a pretty good job telling spam and non-spam apart and saves me from having to dig to a mass of spam comments. So fortunately I don’t even feel the need of having to torture you with crumpled letters when you decide to delurk and leave a comment.
And if I ever had to ask you to prove that you’re indeed a real human being, it would look more like this (via xkcd):
