Areyouahuman is a new captcha system that hopes to replace the typical text captchas that you see, such as those offered by recaptcha. Instead of using text that has been skewed and bent into a near unreadable format, it uses short games to test if the user is a human or not. The games are created in an HTML5 canvas element which most modern browsers support.
Typical captcha
Areyouahuman html5 game captcha
Pros and cons of the Areyouahuman captcha
The idea is a fun one and is certainly less frustrating than trying to work out one of those barely readable text image captchas that are the norm now days. However, the style is very similar to those annoying adverts that are placed in sidebars and headers that try to trick you into clicking through to a website by playing a game – “Shoot the dart and win a prize!”. I do wonder if this will confuse or scare users.
While testing the demos of the Areyouahuman captcha system, I found that it loaded much slower than traditional static image based captchas,
Is Areyouahuman more secure than other captcha systems?
You might be thinking that the Areyouahuman captcha system is more secure than existing text based methods. After-all, most text captchas can be segmented and fed into OCR software to work out the answer. They may not get the answer right every-time, but that’s the benefit of automation, even cracking a captcha 10% of the time is a win for a spammer.
Ultimately, Areyouahuman is no more secure than a text based captcha because if it senses the users browser as not supporting the HTML5 canvas element then it automatically falls back to the recaptcha text based system. This means that any spam software simply needs to pretend that it doesn’t support the HTML5 canvas element and it will immediately side step the Areyouahuman game captcha.
Conclusion
The Areyouahuman captcha system isn’t going to make your site anymore secure against spammers, but it will (maybe) make it more user friendly for genuine visitors who get frustrated with impossibly hard to read text.