: Why are captcha fields so prevelant across the internet? Seems to me that they are an easy way out and band aid solution to a problem that could be solved in other ways. I have never implemented

@Mendez628

You have to look at Captcha as a security measure. With that in mind companies use Captcha for two reasons.


It is the easiest and fastest solution for them to solve bot problems
They are using other means of bot detection but they need additional layers and Captcha is one of those layers


As a company becomes bigger, more well known, and hosts more important/secure systems they become a bigger target. The level of security you need at your company is related to how big of a target you are, no security system is 100% foolproof. So when you see companies like Google, Yahoo, and eBay using Captcha don't be fooled into thinking that that is there only line of defense against bots. That is just one of their many barriers and they choose to use it because it is successful often enough and it is obvious enough that its existence will deter some hackers.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Goswami781

Traffic filtering/limiting has to be done on the server and it's easier to add a captcha to a web page then set that up. Also, it's hard to get traffic filtering/limiting to spot a spambot which has the rate it hits a particular site set quite low.

Vote Up Vote Down