Ticketmaster loses CAPTCHA!

by Danielle Cooley

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/captcha-22-when-online-security-hurts-sales

Yep! LOVE to see a major e-retailer getting on board with this!  (They're not tossing the concept entirely - just replacing the useless "type these unrecognizable characters" with a much-easier-to-solve puzzle or question.

As with any content, there are costs and benefits to having a CAPTCHA. The main benefit, of course, is keeping bots away from your transactions. (Though they can be hacked, so that benefit isn't as absolute as one might think.) The cost is in paying for the service itself (probably not much) and in risking alienating actual paying customers who get frustrated when they can't figure out the CAPTCHA.

Image via http://blog.formstack.com/2012/10/18/good-bad-captcha-guest-post/.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe your paying customers are SO motivated that they will go through 1,000 CAPTCHAS if that's what it takes to buy something from you. (But probably not.) Maybe you are such a hacker target that you really really need a reverse Turing test, even if it's flawed and alienates some customers. (But probably not.)

While I'll concede there are absolutely legitimate uses for reverse Turing tests, there are better ways than CAPTCHA to handle the spam/bot problem