Man, captchas suck.

I think we all agree that captchas are fairly useless and more often than not cause more annoyance than good.
Most captchas are easily broken if someone sets their mind to it. Especially the one that came with this blog script! And even if they do stop bots they also stop blind or visually impaired people from using your system too.

But they are an unfortunate necessity, especially on the high traffic parts of my site like the mini polls where there's currently a captcha I hand coded especially for the mini polls. And so far I'm shocked to say I've not had any spam on there except the usual human spam.
However, today I have constructed an uber-captcha, which I quite like. It is slightly hard to read though.

This new one uses just PHP, no separate app (not possible on this server) or anything like that, and it generates an animated GIF file where every frame is totally unreadable, but when animated together it becomes readable to the human eye.
That's the idea anyway. I might have gone a bit overboard with methods to try and stop people using image filters on layers to get readable text again and it's now fairly hard to read: (hit esc in Firefox to stop it looping and see how messed up a single frame is)

Anyway, feedback would be great on this. Any ideas on what I could do to make it more readable, yet still being awkward to crack.
Also, anyone who cracks it with their own code (no script kiddies) wins a free sandwich Fancy code or code in an esoteric language gets you a coke to go with your sandwich!

To play around with it and see what percentage of them you get right go to http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/gifcaptcha/, let me know what scores you get in the comments.

Stats
The stats are in from last month and they're pretty good for such a small site like this.
As of 31 Mar 2009 - 23:59 I had:

• 23, 332 uniques
• 1, 317, 979 Hits
• 908.78 MB Bandwidth used

Though that only sounds like a small amount of bandwidth, roughly 85% of hits were to the bar images from the mini polls, and they're only 200 bytes.
So to get over 900MB from that is fairly impressive!

I don't think I'll ever get stats as good as that again so I'll have to thank Rob Manuel, co founder of B3ta, who got me 99% of those stats for using my poll script and for crediting me on e4 where he used the results gathered by the mini polls.

If anyone else uses them for something interesting do let me know

Polls
Like I said before, if anyone uses them for random or cool things please let me know. And don't be shy to suggest a feature, let me know of a bug or even propose a whole new project to do if you think it'll help you or others.

I did do some updates to the mini polls since I last blogged about them, so don't forget to wander over and take a look at what's new. I really need to come up with more creator options, like specific colours and such. Also the create page won't let you add new options without javascript which is a pain. But as they aren't overly important I'm putting them off for now.

Other Projects
I've been carrying on with work for a new version of Palmnet. So far I've re-done all the work I had before to make things easier, play together nicer and to implement some of the things I've learned lately from reading online and hearing things in lectures.
Lots of work will have to be done on the way all my projects are handled though as currently it's a total free-for-all when I make a new project, with no set order, file placement or even links to it. All that will have to be changed to conform to a while heap of new rules I'm setting for myself. And a lot of projects might get some re-writes and updates so that they can be put in the new system and be presentable if open sourced

Somebody on a forum I go to the other day jogged my memory on the new shoutbox system. I did a little bit of work on it but am kind of stuck with how I can do plugins for the image rendering script. If anyone knows much about that kind of thing, mostly just theory of plugins and modularity, please get in contact!
I seem to just have functions that need to go everywhere, data that needs to get altered and all sorts of crazy things. So it might take a while yet. Other than that, there is an API that's almost done, the RSS is done, the basic image rendering script is done, the posting script is done, the filtering system is done...It's all coming along, slowly.

There are a few other things that I'm currently working on for uni too which are taking up quite a bit of time, especially team projects and the joys of ASP.Net... So I can't fully dedicate all my time to coding for myself like I used to. Which sucks, but priorities are priorities I guess.

The other random projects I'm working on in secret are coming along nicely though, and I thought of an amazing one to start today, though it requires C# skills...skills which I might not have yet. But if/when I do, prepare for massive amounts of blogging full of awesomeness