The evils of Captcha

I am finding more and more sites using Captcha and similar ‘verification’ systems to try to filter out spammers and bots. Unfortunately, the images are getting worse and worse, and hardly legible for legitimate humans, even with 20/20 eyesight to make out! As this article points out, it is simply lazy to use Captcha instead of simple Email verification and spam filtering… Even worse, I often see these captchas on small sites, or on ‘contact us’ pages– so when a potential customer needs to contact you, you must aggravate them by forcing them through this horribly designed ‘security measure’? Talk about great customer service…