Captcha or activation email?

Question

I'm building a site where people have to register as members.
To try and beat the bots, do you think that it's better to
have a
captcha on registration form, or should I go the whole hog
and send out
some sort of activation email?
Vix

Answer 1

On 13 Jul 2006 in macromedia.dreamweaver, Vix wrote:
> I'm building a site where people have to register as
members.
>
> To try and beat the bots, do you think that it's better
to have a
> captcha on registration form, or should I go the whole
hog and send
> out some sort of activation email?
I'd go with the activation email myself. I don't like
CAPTCHAs; the
poorly implemented ones tend to look cheesy, and even the
well-done ones
can be gotten around. Read the section on Circumvention, and
the links
on Defeating CAPTCHAs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
A couple things I've noted:
- I haven't run into a bot yet which will start a session, or
which has
javascript enabled.
- The number of people who surf with javascript disabled is
in the 1%
range.
Joe Makowiec
http://makowiec.net/
Email:
http://makowiec.net/email.php