I’m pretty sure I’m speaking for everyone when I say captcha is usually really annoying and frustrating on most sites. I consider myself to be pretty intelligent and savvy but I have a terrible time trying to figure out what they’re saying most of the time, unless it’s a simple math problem or there’s no noise added to the captcha image.

While the simple math problems or basic logic questions work, they still make you type something in, and I’m a big fan of “the less steps it involves, the better”. I’ve been trying to find something that not only keeps most of the spam bots from filling out my forms but is super easy for visitors to use so that it won’t scare them away.

Well, I found such a solution a couple of days ago, called SexyCaptcha. You can download it and try it out for yourself at http://blog.lukeblackamore.com/2009/10/sexy-captcha-new-drag-and-drop-captcha.html. What it does is display four simple shapes, and an outline of one of those shapes. All the user has to do is click or drag the appropriate shape into the shape outline, and voila…the captcha is passed!
sexy captcha

How simple and creative is that?!? The only downside that I see is if you want to display it any smaller than 433 pixels wide, you’re going to have to shrink the images and mess with the css but it’s not that big a deal. I think I’ll be using this on my future projects for sure, until I find something better and/or easier, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon!

It took me a while to adapt it to my cakephp projects (only because I was missing some typos…typical lol), but was able to do so and it works perfectly. If you’re looking for a super easy captcha that still performs the same security as one someone has to type in, then give SexyCaptcha a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.