Most sites at least employ server access log checking and banning along with some kind of bot prevention measure like a CAPTCHA (those messed-up text images).

The problem with CAPTCHAs is that they poss a threat to the user experience. Luckily they now come with user friendly features like refresh and audio versions.

Anyway, like linux vs windows, it isn't worth the time of a spammer to customize and/or build a script to handle a custom CAPTCHA example that only pertains to one site. Therefore, I was wondering if there might be better ways to handle the whole CAPTCHA thing.

In A Better CAPTCHA Peter Bromberg mentions that one way would be to convert the image to HTML and display it embedded in the page. On http://shiflett.org/ Chris simply asks users to type his name into an input. Examples like this are ways to simplifying the CAPTCHA experience while decreasing the value for spammers. Does anyone know of more good examples I could use or see any problem with the embedded image idea?