No one likes to be distracted. During the last 24 hours or so I found myself needlessly getting distracted, time and again, while I was just trying to go about getting things done on the web. It was captcha that got in my way, and it was annoying.
Automation has become a household word. There are so many of those software robots that are willing to do things for you at the command of a single click. And true, the Internet has it's fare share of jerks, striving to disrupt everyone's work whenever they can. But I'm not sure captcha is the way to fight back. You are not really solving a problem when you are driving away two thirds of legitimate users from your site. Some websites have even taken matters too far. They not only want users to solve those depressing image puzzles when registering or logging in, they want users to do it even before getting a glimpse of their homepage. It is clear that websites should not use captcha unnecessarily, or the message passed to potential users would not be what they intend.