Gotcha CAPTCHA

By Eric Jones | August 7, 2004 | ColdFusion

It’s a link to a CFX which will allow you to generate CAPTCHA’s for your website. What’s a CAPTCHA you ask? It’s those cool images which have text and a crazy background which is readable by humans (well most of us anyhow) and hard (not impossible) for computers (ie spam bots) to read and decipher.

It’s primarily used in conjunction with a login script, or a sign-up script to prevent people from automating sign-up’s or generating a ton of false accounts etc.

Learn more about CAPTCHA here.

Written By:

Eric Jones

Eric is an avid ColdFusion developer and gamer who currently occupies a desk in Atlanta GA where is is a Senior Application Developer and lead developer for a new Open Source CMS. Eric also sits on the Board of Directors for his local CFUG.

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{ 4 comments }

Anonymous November 3, 2004 at 5:13 am: See also this post: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=207024
foltzwerk August 8, 2004 at 2:16 pm: Tere is a CFC solution for generating CAPTCHA images. It is called Painted Word CFC and I’m pretty sure it requires CFMX 6.1.
Painted Word CFC:
http://tinyurl.com/2r253
That site is in Italian so you may want to use Google’s language services for tranlsation.
For a live demo of Painted Word CFC:
http://tinyurl.com/47h9b
cyngon August 8, 2004 at 6:44 am: …as blind Internet users across the globe simultaneously rejoice.
Or not.
There’s got to be a better way to solve this problem than captchas.
Skunk August 7, 2004 at 11:33 pm: The problem with CAPTCHAs is that they impose a usability and accessibility penalty on genuine users, while doing nothing to stop determined spammers. Have you heard about the free porn trick? Spammers set up a script which takes CAPTCHA challenges and re-serves them on porn sites – solve the CAPTCHA, get free porn. They thus turn millions of purvy surfers in to a massive distributed CAPTCHA cracking system.
Of course, that’s assuming your CAPTCHA system isn’t week enough to be crackable using OCR anyway (a surprisingly large amount are).
Matt May has some excellent coverage of this topic here: http://www.bestkungfu.com/?p=445