Captcha? Каптча? カプチャ?

February 8, 2008 8:40 PM

Is using a Latin-alphabet captcha accessible across languages/character sets?

I'm designing a site which will hopefully deal with people worldwide, across a ton of languages and alphabets. Is it realistic to use an out-of-the-box captcha solution, even though they're all based on the Latin alphabet? Are the characters universally recognizable? Easy to enter on everyone's keyboard?

I don't think the site is going to be spam central or anything, and I'll gladly strip it down to numbers-only to give bots a little road bump, I'd just rather have a little protection in place rather than nothing. Alternatives I've come across (math equations, 'common sense' questions) mostly seem silly or more trouble than they're worth, but I'm open to suggestions.

posted by soma lkzx to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Is your URL in latin characters? Then your captcha can be.
posted by aubilenon at 8:50 PM on February 8, 2008

I've seen a captcha system that used a picture and a row of slightly different pictures with radio buttons. You had to choose the right picture to prove you were human. You could colour the pictures differently to make it harder for robots. It would be language independant.
posted by maremare at 9:00 PM on February 8, 2008

aubilenon: That's what I was thinking. Hopefully there isn't some otherwise-highly-useful subset of internet users who can do absolutely nothing but click links and type in non-latin characters.
posted by soma lkzx at 10:11 PM on February 8, 2008

The images will turn into a problem before the radio buttons will. Lynx, a purely text-based browser that won't even display in-line images, still supports forms pretty well — and if Lynx can do it, graphical browsers definitely can.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:16 AM on February 9, 2008

Wait, how would Lynx even see the image that has the Catchpa in it? Pardon my foolishness, but how is Lynx even relevant?
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:34 AM on February 9, 2008

You could use numbers.
posted by genghis at 2:13 PM on February 9, 2008