Capteacher!

© Sabu Francis, 2007

We wish to thank the nice people at http://wordbrowser.net for providing the words for this special Captcha service

Ok. This is one of those funny services which may or may not suit you. It is a 'captcha' service, which is free of cost (For sometime at least, till the server starts complaining)...but this one has a twist. This note is for experienced webmasters who know what is a captcha. Others may want to hang around and read it anyway, if they wish.

I got sick and tired of looking a captchas that only had a random collection of letters. No doubt they prevent automated web robots from processing some critical forms because you are forced to type the letters from the captcha image. But what a waste of time!

So I thought, why not make the captchas teach something when the person is in the middle of filling a form. Kind of a digression some may say. And they may very well be right. But then some others (Edward de Bono for e.g.) may call it a displacement activity

In our Captcha, the person filling up a captcha can take a small diversion and read up the meaning of a new word. That way, everytime a form is being filled; they get to learn a new word too.

This could be suitable for educational sites. But maybe there are other uses too. Maybe for some word games. Scrabble, anyone? Contact us if you want to use this service directly on your server. We can sell it to you... Or if you want some more features.

Registration form:
To demonstrate this Captcha service, the registration form for this service is itself protected by our Captcha mechanism. You would need to fill this captcha to access the registration form.

Usage:
Once you register using the form above, you would be given a registration number. Lets call that rrr Now, in the page from where you would be calling the captcha (the one that you had specified during the registration); you would insert the following HTML tag:

<iframe src="http://www.syncspace.com/captcha/getcaptcha.cgi?a=rrr&r1=/pass.html&r2=/fail.html" />

Please note the following parameters in the above link:
a = the registration number that was given to you
r1 = the page to be loaded into that iframe when the captcha is corrctly handled by the visitor
r2 = the page to be loaded if the captcha fails

It is strongly suggested that the 'r1' page should first verify that the HTTP_REFERER cgi environment variable is pointing to the captcha generation page of our site else it would be dead easy for someone to circumvent the captcha and go to the r1 page directly. The verification should be done using some server side process such as a PHP page, etc.

Caveats
This service is NOT meant for any high-end security. It just puts in a simple hurdle in front of spammers. An insistent hacker can still get past our captcha, if so desired. At the same time, we should remember that most spammers use automated 'robots' and is unlikely to hack personally into a website by filling up captchas.

Any questions?

Use our Facebook group to ask them. Best wishes. And let us know how you used it.

Thank you

Sabu Francis. Head honcho, Syncspace

See also:
Captcha, Capteacher