The reason for these images becoming more and more difficult to decipher is that the programs used to place spam become more sophisticated in order to overcome the obstacles placed in there way.  Gmail, yahoo and hotmail have all had their CAPTCHA images broken by spammers and although it is fairly easy to present a image in a different way it does mean they have to be fairly obscure.

Gmail, yahoo and hotmail’s CAPTCHA broken by spammers

This method is fairly widely used on the internet but places the emphasis on the user to prove they are not a computer program.  There are alternatives to this approach for instance akismet looks at content submitted to a web site and assesses it against various criteria to determine whether it is likely to be spam.  Flagged content can then be reviewed by the administrator.  Similarly anti-spam programs can be used to filter out spam sent from contact forms rather than making it more difficult for customers to contact you.

Honey pots are another method that can be used on forms to help prevent submissions from malicious programs.  This involves placing extra fields within a form that will be invisible to your users.  As the programs do not view pages in the same way as users they tend to complete these fields meaning you can reject these submissions. Ned Batchelder’s article Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots covers the use of honey pots to prevent spam in more detail.  It also indicates how to make things even more difficult for automated spam programs by randomising field names and using the submitters IP address to prevent automatic submissions from groups of machines.

These methods can do a lot to help minimise misuse of your site by malicious programs.  However, to some extent it will depend on the value of your site to spammers.  Gmail, yahoo and hotmail have seen their CAPTCHA images broken as it is worth the effort in order to get large numbers of programs automatically registering email accounts and sending spam.  Honey pots on there own will be easier to overcome if there is good reason to do so, although Ned Batchelder’s full method is likely to be more difficult.  You can reduce the value of overcoming your defences by doing things such as using no follow links in comments on your site so they will not improve search engine rating.

The main thing is not to use CAPTCHA indiscriminately on forms.  There may be some situations where it is useful particularly if the returns for beating your defences are significant.  However, in the majority of cases you are creating a barrier for the people using your site.

Pownce the micro blogging community site that allows you to send messages, links and files to your friends will shut down on 15 December 2008.  The site, created by among others Kevin Rose the man that brought you digg, has been bought by six apart the company behind blogging software such as moveable type and typepad.

The decision to simply close the site rather than attempt to integrate the pownce community into their own site seems a little odd since community sites rely on their ability to retain and build users. Tools have been provided allowing the users to move their content to Vox, six aparts blogging community, however, I imagine many users will feel rejected by six apart and move to another platform. One can only imagine that unnamed factors made the cost of maintaining both communities or integrating them prohibitive.

Micro-blogging is a phenomena that has seen massive growth over the last couple of years. These sites allow users to provide short text messages updating people on there status and what they are up to.  There are a large variety of these sites including ones with novel features such as emotionr which allows users to rate how happy they are and provides statistics on global happiness.  However, one of the most successful is twitter, in fact it has been integrated into the Userxp site.

The success of Twitter comes down to three main factors; Their ability to quickly build their user base before their competitors, that they provided free sms updates (something no longer available in the UK) and that they allowed developers to produce their own applications.  One such application is Twistori a site that displays twitter updates containing ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘think’, ‘believe’, ‘feel’ or ‘wish’.  Although of little practical use it is none the less facinating to watch and allowing this type of creativity certainly helps promote the twitter site.