Captcha annoyance

Captcha’s are a requirement on the world nowadays. It seems like at almost every turn I have to enter a captcha. Posting and searching seem to be the two heaviest hitters in the “requires a captcha to use our website”. The oddest one I’ve seen is when purchasing something. I figure my credit card would handle the whole “I’m a real person” perspective.

I’m overall OK with captcha’s though, as long as I can read them. However, it’s not the image but the input line that is beyond annoying. There’s something about them that just does not make any sense to me. Simply put, I do not understand why the input line uses spell check. It just doesn’t make sense. If the spell check actually guesses the word, then you defeat the purpose of the captcha. If it doesn’t and puts in some other word, either the user does not notice the change until it is too late and they get thrown back into the next captcha guess, or they notice the change and get annoyed, having to back it out and hopefully type it in correctly. Even the biggest captcha provider, re-captcha, seems to be guilty of this spell checking fiasco (is this really a fiasco?).

Who’s Complaining Now?
I have a solution, at least for Chrome and Safari. It seems to me that it’d be so much easier to use a captcha if you didn’t have to jack with the spell checker. Then I looked into it, and yes, you can disable the spell checker. Just use this bit of code:

<textarea spellcheck=“false”> or <input type=“text” spellcheck=“false”>

Check out this handy dandy stack overflow post for more details.

I truly believe that if the person who runs the cabal that works on captcha’s could make this happen, that it’d make at least my day a bit more pleasant.