I hate captchas. And I don't think I'm alone in this world. While I'm thinking about which parts of a traffic light I should click on now, I often have to consider whether I might not be a robot after all, while the website prompts me to repeat the task for the 10th time, which even children should be able to solve.
What is the traffic light in this picture?
On a short trip into the past, we can quickly see how the world of captchas has changed. It started with typing small texts, then clicking on pictures, now the smallest changes of the mouse on the page are observed and used to find out how likely it is that the person browsing the website is really a human being or not a machine. Quick mouse changes from one button to another? Entered the email a little too quickly? Only then does ReCaptcha draw attention to itself and ask the user (or robot?!) to solve one of those beloved picture tasks.
But lately my inbox has been filling up with emails from sponsors who seem to care enough about working with me to ask for the price of cooperation in an incredible number of different languages. The senders have names like "Robert Aiden" and I am supposed to get back to them via e-mail at "first_noellepetti@yahoo.com", for example. They obviously don't care that my blog has no potential for sponsors at the moment, instead they are dying for some kind of reaction from me.
Here's to good cooperation...
In the meantime, even my formspree limit has been reached, so that I can no longer receive any new messages via my contact form for this month. At this point I realised: it can't go on like this. Formspree's spam protection couldn't help either, but as a good user I reported all messages, of course.
I mean, there were no messages coming in now.
So I looked around the market for captchas and first visited a site for European technology alternatives, which I had used several times in the past. I highly recommend anyone who wants to create a website or similar and wants to use more privacy-friendly tools to visit the list. The beautiful frontend makes it easy to get to the right place. Their recommended product - FriendlyCaptcha - looks just right at first glance, and the user doesn't even have to click on images, as it appears to be based on a proof of work principle.
You have to press exactly zero buttons.
We should also mention hCaptcha, which - due to the lack of a company headquarters in the EU- is not listed here. It is very similar to ReCaptcha, even though I would have to select more images in the past. All in all, it seems like a somewhat older generation of captchas, which doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Now, of course, one can rightly ask: these are nice alternatives, but why is there a ReCaptcha on the contact page now anyway? There is exactly one reason for this: I don't want to use my own servers to host this blog. The site is hosted by Github Pages, and messages to me through my contact page are forwarded to me by Formspree via email. And Formspree only supports ReCaptcha. Personally, I chose the (older) v2 version of ReCaptcha because at least you know where you stand and that your data is being transferred to Google. Nevertheless, I feel uncomfortable with the decision and would like to use this article to draw attention to another way of contacting people: The good old, classic email to justus [at] justcoding.tech. This is exactly the inbox to which Formspree also delivers. For a bit more security and privacy, I am open to encrypted communication via S/MIME as well as PGP. The PGP key is available here, for sending the S/MIME key I ask for prior - innocuous - contact, as it changes every three months and I don't want to keep updating it.
I would be very grateful for further suggestions or the sending of alternatives to Formspree to this very address, as I am by no means satisfied with the current solution - as described above.