I am absolutely sick of captcha/image verification on directories (the only thing worse is registration) along with many others members of DP such as mystikmedia. And i was thinking of starting a directory or website that lists directories with no captchas only & rating those directories submitted on the ability to submit to these directories easily. I believe people will appreciate such a list. What do you think to this idea?
I can imagine the spam i will get if i disabled that option.. Free directories are a spammers hunting ground Not much of a fan on this idea, however ever list has a market and this could actually do well Yup, registration defo sucks
Yep, I agree captcha sucks, as does registration and flash homepages. The site should be designed for the submitter with the minimum amount of clicks to reach the target (Payment) page.
How hard is to type the code in the box? Or how long does it take? I know some people dont like it, but what percent is this?
I get a lot on my directories but deleting them takes 2 minutes. Compared to all the minutes of time i could cause the submitters. Quite hard a lot of the time, as it's often very difficult to read them (some are worse than others). Whilst submitting 20 sites & getting invalid code at least 5 times it can add an extra 3 minutes on the submissions. Loads of people i would think
Some captchas are clear but I've encountered difficult ones and given up after getting it wrong 3 times. Also some submitters such as Mystikmedia will ask for validation to be removed because they're going to submit 20 - 30 sites in one go. I use phpld 3.2 and haven't had any real problems with spam since disabling captcha.
I don't think captcha is something bad and as someone said how hard it is to type 4 or 5 extra characters? I agree there are some smart guys having it set up on super-extra-mega-heavy distorsion so you can't even guess if there are letters or characters in there. After my guess failed I never re-submit. Overall I think captcha is helpful. Someone asked me to turn it off in order to submit a few websites and I forgot it off for about two days! over 400 spammy submissions, so... thank you, captcha!
Sekrit - the easier you make the submission process, the better. Why complicate the process or make it difficult for someone to give you their money? I tend to agree and do not require registration or use captcha. Keep in mind the possibility that some may experience difficulty reading the image.
Captchas can be a pain, but if you set it up to the most basic one (only 4 digits, for example), it will block spam, and in the same time it will be very easy to read and type in.
Captcha is fine if only numbers are used... People hate captcha because they sometimes cant make heads of tails of the thing.
What about directories which have two forms, one with a captcha for the free submit, and one without for paid? As far as I can tell, that's the arrangement that seems to make most sense. Go ahead and make such a list, if only because it will be interesting to check back on it in 6 months time, to see which directories are still captcha-free, and whether or not they have switched to paid in the meantime.
Not that much. I have it disabled for my www.leadingdir.com for a long time now. I do get few spam listing requestes per day but, it I ca't call it "bulk spam". In the end if you can't delete few spam submissions per day, I doubt you ability to moderate your paid submissions per day too.
I turn off this feature last month and I happy report that I did not have any problems with spammers so far.
What about the accessibility issues for blind users if image verification is on? For those pro-captcha people.
The problem isn't really a directory having some form of captcha. The problem is when they use generated images that are impossible to read. I've been seeing more and more directories implement simple math and other questions quite successfully to prohibit automated submissions without driving human submittors batty. Creating custom captchas with both text and picture-based questions was one of the very first features that drew me to the phpLynx script. If a submittor is too busy to type in a 9 as in "what is 3 times 3?" - then perhaps I'm too busy to review their listing.
You can of course argue for and against having captcha. There is no doubt that the submission process is much easier, faster, and hussle free if you have it disabled. It gives an added convenience to the submitters.
As per the post above, what if the submitter is visually impaired? http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ "The widespread use of CAPTCHA in low-volume, low-resource sites, on the other hand, is unnecessarily damaging to the experience of users with disabilities. An explicitly inaccessible access control mechanism should not be promoted as a solution, especially when other systems exist that are not only more accessible, but may be more effective, as well. It is strongly recommended that smaller sites adopt spam filtering and/or heuristic checks in place of CAPTCHA."
It once took me 7 attempts to submit to one particular site, in the end i just gave up... if you have a spam mod (like you can get on phpLD) you can pretty much catch all spam!