Do We Still Need Catcha on Forms?

You may or may not know that those silly looking and often frustrating graphics characters that are on website forms are there to keep automated scripts from being able to submit the form with their all important marketing message.  The principal is simple;  force a user to enter a code when submitting a form.  Because the "bot" cannot see what the graphics code is, you effectively eliminate these unwanted form submissions.  Recently we launched a website for a radio station http://www.980wcap.com.  The website among other things contains a place for a visitor to enter a comment of "talking" point to the radio host.  These forms contain the necessary captcha code, but still a good number of spam messages got through.  After looking at them in pretty close detail, the "how" they got past the captcha is unknown but there was a pattern of a link to a website being included.  We were effectively able to eliminate the spam by looking to see if the comment contained a link to a website.  If it did, the form data was not delivered.  This then begs the question.  If checking for a link in the comment eliminates spam, can we make the forms more user friendly by eliminating the captcha code?  We're going to try that on a few websites and see what the impact is.

-- Charlie

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