Form checking - human or robot?


For a number of years now, web users have been plagued by ever trickier CAPTCHA systems. These were designed to fool 'robot' programs and ensure that only forms completed by humans were sent. They were OK for a little while, but it quickly became apparent that CAPTCHA was in an arms race which it could only win by making things so difficult for the 'robots' that most humans were defeated by them as well.

Old style image matching validation

Our original, old-style image matching
validation, now no longer live.

Late in 2014 Google announced new approaches, based on gestures and images. Here at Melchior, we were glad they caught up. We introduced human/robot discrimination by recognising what was depicted in an image in 2008 - along with simple alternative descriptions for the sight impaired (e.g. match "an ear" with "part of the body used for hearing"). It was very quick and easy to write, and has worked well in practice.

More recently, we've developed another tool for use in forms which discriminates between humans and robots:-

Registration Form extract