Security is good and bots annoy the hell out of me as well, but this is really the case of going over the top. I tried to register to the forums of the popular Mac torrent software Transmission. However, I got this captcha to make sure I was human:
I challenge you to read it. I could make out 2NVR and a T at the end… but it’s supposedly six characters. I don’t consider myself visually impaired - as the site suggests quite cheekily – or otherwise challenged, yet after three tries and three different but equally frustrating captchas I was told to try again later.
I have the same captcha on autopatch.de but spam bots have gone so rampant throughout the last weeks one’s busy almost half the day trying to figure out if an application is a spammer or not.
I think that only with javascript you could filter most of spam without having to meddle with all these annoying captchas. So far as i know no bots have javascript.
These captchas actually miss creativity… we could create much simpler and more accessible ones – like “what day was two days before tomorrow” or “what’s the opposite color of green” and so on. One of my favourites was on a technical forum where we had to solve equations like “what’s the solution of 2*log10*exp(X)=2″? The latter also served as a kind of natural selection.
I actually wish there was an IQ test at the login screen of WoW, something along the lines of what you suggested.
Well the last letter is definitely a J for me, but… I guess this is a model case of the makers forgetting to check if their creations are usable or not =_=;