I spend near to 14 hours online on my laptop and out of it, I must be spend like 2-3 hours just reading blogs, my rss feeds (I am subscribed to 250+ feeds!) and replying to comments. Now I often see many bloggers using captcha for their comment form to avoid spam bots but what they fail to realize is that by having captcha, they are doing more harm to their blog then helping it.

Here are the 3 reasons why you should not have captcha in your blog -

1. Lets admit it, humans don’t like filling captchas – I hate filling captcha’s and I am sure most of the others too. I mean many times I need to spend more time in trying to see the letters and digits in captcha then making the comment. So captcha’s reduces user experience on your blog.

2. Captha’s don’t work many times – Many times captchas’s do not work, for example you fill it and it says Please enter the correct digits or characters and if it happens more then two times, expect the commentators to close the page and to never make another comment on your blog. And believe me, most of the blog owners do not even realizes that there is some thing wrong with their captchas.

3. They are not the best solution to prevent spam – Captcha’s are not the best solution to prevent spam and bots as they anyway break captcha codes . Instead of captcha, you may like to use other wordpress plugins to stop bots. You can see some such comments here (ignore the 3rd point)

Also I feels its worth spending 10 minutes per day to manually approve comments and to reply to them, it helps your readers interacting with you. So if you are using captcha, disable it right now and see the increase in number of comments.

What do you think about using captchas ? should you use it or not ?

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