Comments on: Invisible Captcha Concept – Stop Spam Mail

By: John

John — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:28:10 +0000

Include the attribute tabindex=”-1″ in the input tag to skip this field with manual tabbing – hopefully the spambots don’t skip this field too!

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:36:06 +0000

The CSS handling is not difficult at all, there are CSS libraries out there that will calculate this for you. It might be a bit trickier if it works by hiding the field behind some other div, but still this can be calculated.

Furthermore, the problem is that this request parameter keeps stable. So even without CSS calculation you just need to know which parameter(s) to skip for certain websites. It’s like a fixed password.

You can’t fiddle around with Turing

–Alex

By: Bob Jonkman

Bob Jonkman — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:11:05 +0000

The REAL beauty of the Invisible Captcha is that it doesn’t inconvenience users of the site, and that it’s a completely accessible technology — usable by screen readers, braille devices &c — because there’s nothing there!

Thanx for this; I’ll be putting something similar in my forms from now on.

–Bob.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:03:24 +0000

Bogdan thanks for your comment.. the whole idea behind this is that the spam bot does not know if the field is hidden or not so it presumes it is another field that can be exploited. Sure if everybody started using this script someone would develop a way to ignore it very easily by just telling the spam bot to omit any fields with a specfic name or class.. and in which case we then change the name or class!

The only way they could destroy the whole concept is if the bot was able to query the stylesheet and then reference classes that apply to the containing html elements of the field to deduce if its is hidden by CSS or not, that would not be an easy task.

Besides, the beauty of this is it is not mainstream like capcha or the others so the few people who have found this and who use it can rest assured that works great and its unlikely to be hacked any time soon.

By: Bogdan Bivolaru

Bogdan Bivolaru — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:50:07 +0000

Most anti-spam systems do not scale – they fail as soon as they become popular. That is because spam bot herders are real people who like gaming our antispam systems.
How long will it take for a spammer to write a rule for his bots not to fill anything in that “invisible captcha field”?
It’s just an endless arms race between spammers and us to keep our systems relevant. So I take the side of reCaptcha, it seems just as good as anything else on the long term.

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Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:44:38 +0000

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By: Andrew Felske (knopper67) 's status on Friday, 23-Oct-09 04:26:24 UTC - Identi.ca

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:26:20 +0000

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By: Tomalak Geret'kal

Tomalak Geret'kal — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:01:23 +0000

Heh, so simple yet not something I’d thought of at all. Good idea… turn the spam filtering process on its head!

By: knopper67's status on Saturday, 19-Sep-09 08:31:25 UTC - Identi.ca

knopper67's status on Saturday, 19-Sep-09 08:31:25 UTC - Identi.ca — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:31:29 +0000

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By: Elena

Elena — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:00:11 +0000

Thanks Ben. It’s much appreciated.