So last time I mentioned the spam on the minipoll system. It only took another few hours after writing that blog post before I ended up putting a captcha on it!

I wouldn't have minded so much if it was good old fashioned spam but instead it was just lame random letters which means that someone was either out to annoy me, and succeeding mildly, or a person trying to point out that I needed security on the minipolls, which also succeeded slightly.

I would have been annoyed if I didn't like coding, but the fact is I do and I love a challenge. Especially an image based one like a captcha!

So after about twenty minutes of fiddling, testing and slight refining I came out with this:

I don't think it's too bad really. Needs some fine tuning as about 50% of the time it's unreadable to humans let alone bots. But I think the slightly blurry ditherd look is nifty.

You can check out the code for it over in the codebox: http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/testbox/codebox/index.php?module=snippet&id=90

Any ideas, suggestions on tweaking things like performance or ways to annoy spam bots more are always welcome in the comments.

And don't forget to see it in action over on the mini poll site