Reasons not to use Captcha

CFFormProtect works, but what I generally recommend is that people pick one or two alternatives like Akismet or Project Honey Pot (both included in CFFP) and roll their own. CFFP is overkill for some folks, but if you want a fairly easy solution, it's always worked for me. :) And I am on the verge of releasing version 2.0, which is already in place here on my blog for testing.

It would be great if you followed this up with a list of points on why other technologies work where captchas fail. As is, I think your list lacks a solid argument against the use of captchas, to address your points specifically:

1) Well yes there's always the choice not to use captchas, but people may hate filling out a form to register on a site, enter their password to log into a site, etc., but those steps are necessary to make a certain system work effectively.

2) That's true it doesn't, but I'd argue one of the most insidious qualities of spam is that it is sent in quantity, which a spammer manually filling out forms cannot accomplish without significant time on the part of the spammer.

3) & 4) This is a balance to maintain, security versus usability. However, I think the idea is to combat spam, making it more difficult for a spammer to fill out a form, not so much to eliminate it entirely. There never will be an unbreakable captcha, as there never will be an unbreakable password. The point is to make it more difficult for spammers with minimum inconvenience for legitimate users.

5) I'm a fan of reCaptcha (<a href="http://recaptcha.net">recaptcha.net</a&...;). It is accessible to blind users and makes me feel warm and fuzzy about stopping spam and helping digitize books at the same time. Even if I spam bot gets through, at least they're helping out :)

Oops, I just noticed that you said "why other technologies work". The reason Akismet and Project Honey Pot work where captcha's fail is because of crowd sourcing. The knowledge from millions of other blogs and sites work together to identify spam. So even human spammers will get blocked, because they are recognized by the community as spammers, BEFORE they fill out your form. CFFormProtect combines many techniques together, but I have read testimonials from people that only use Akismet, or only use Project Honey Pot, and report great success. And again, without annoying your users.

I've used CFFormProtect for almost 18 months now and I'm very pleased with it. It saved me thousands and thousands of commentspam, even without using the Akismet function. It currently runs on a Bluedragon 6.2 CF-driven website as well as on CF7 and CF8 websites.

I became enthusiastic about the tool because I generally dislike CAPTCHA's - why should I have to fill in a simple mathquestion or try and decifer weirdly looking digits and letters? I just want to comment - the beauty is CFFormProtect is it's ability to do all checks serverside without the user ever even noticing it's present doing its work. I'm ready for version 2.0 even though I won't be using the Project Honey Pot feature. Thanx Jake for this little piece of CFC-magic.