CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and filling one in is sometimes as tedious as typing out that acronym! So I was interested to see a new CAPTCHA that relies on simply manipulating a slider on screen until a picture right. It’s easy and quick to do with the mouse on a computer, it’s also easy with your touch screen tablet or smartphone. This new CAPTCHA system is the Minteye slide to fit captcha.
The reCAPTCHA service made me feel better about filling in tricky little CAPTCHAs on websites, as I knew I was helping to digitize old books that OCR software had been unable to read. However it is still a bit of a chore if you spend a lot of time online and filling in forms for this and that. I’ve just tried the Minteye slide to fit CAPTCHA and it really is a breeze. You can try it at the demonstration page, where Minteye give out some usage and benefit statistics for the new system.
As well as the greater CAPTCHA conversion rate, an alluring carrot for site publishers is the new advertising revenue stream from the slide to fit image. There is a slight glitch here though because people running Adblock browser extensions may not see the CAPTCHA and may therefore be puzzled by how to add a comment or enter a competition on the webpage in question. However people really do look at the ads, they have to, to solve the CAPTCHA.
Scientific news blog Science 2.0 points out that the human employee powered spamming empires in China and eastern Europe will find it even faster to add spam comments to pages, thanks to the swiftness of usage of the Minteye system. For many webmasters it wouldn’t be so tricky to try the new Minteye CAPTCHA system and see for themselves if it works out better with more conversions and even for a bit of extra advertising revenue.
Minteye “makes the right people feel welcome”