What is Captcha, and How Can It Help You?
If you’ve been on the internet for long, you’ve undoubtedly encountered a Captcha in many forms. They’re an important way to keep spam and hackers out of your website’s contact forms, and if you run a website, you should have some Captcha. While out-of-date plugins cause the majority of hacks on WordPress websites, some use other more automated exploits that a simple captcha can help prevent.
What is Captcha?
The name is an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Distinguish Computers and Humans. That may give you a hint as to its intended purpose. Still, at its core, the Captcha is a method of determining whether a form, login attempt, or any other type of interactivity on a website is performed by a human or not. Its purpose is to keep scripts and bots from spamming or brute forcing comments, contact forms, or logins.
What Are the Various Types of Captcha?
Captcha was almost always a jumble of upper and lowercase letters and numbers that you had to fill in via a text box to prove that you were human when it first appeared on web pages. As artificial intelligence improved and computers became better at recognizing these captchas, they had to evolve, and they now come in various shapes and sizes. Some use the same old method, while others rely on you identifying objects in photos, parts of images, or even on artificial intelligence to determine whether the user is a human, bot, or script. Captchas are becoming more intelligent and less intrusive as time passes.
What Would You Do With It?
You can use Captcha anywhere you have a form on your website. Suppose your website accepts comments on articles or contact form submissions. In that case, Captcha can help prevent many basic spam bots from filling these submissions by requiring the form filler to pass a simple test to determine if they’re human. Captchas are essential to any login page because they prevent bots or programs from simply trying thousands of passwords to guess the correct one. However, this is becoming less popular and is being replaced by two-factor authentication.
What About Availability?
Captcha can also help your website visitors who require accessibility options. They can accomplish this by including an audio component that reads aloud the letters and numbers the user is supposed to type in. Captchas that are more advanced and modern don’t even require much human interaction, instead examining cookies and IP addresses to determine if the user is legitimate.
The humble Captcha can save you hours of sifting through spam comments and the annoyance of an inbox full of spam from a contact form and can be implemented on your website in minutes. There is no reason not to use Captcha on your website.
