I realize that tools to fight the automated scripts of web-spammers are needed, but come ON! Can't we come up with something better than IMPOSSIBLE captchas? Captcha good. Too hard or broken captcha not good.
Take this one I got after trying to add a comment to Duncans weblog.
Did I type it right? I thought so - but TypePad didn't. They made me try and try again about 10 times before letting me add the comment! So assuming I'm not a complete idiot, it's their fault. Either they had a bug comparing the text or they made it TOO HARD.
I don't mean to pick on SixApart though; it just happened that they were the ones I got the screenshot of.
If only they'd use reCaptchas, then it wouldn't feel so wasteful. You might have heard about how spammers use humans doing something else to solve captchas. The reCaptcha project uses humans to do OCR of old books that the computers had a hard time with. Pretty clever, huh?
Looks like they're using Authen::Captcha right out of the box.