No doubt many others have thought of this already, but today I had a brainwave..

You have forms that use the dreaded captcha, which just sucks. Better forms use a honey pot trap but it’s still a bit weird. What if we checked to see how long a user had spent filling out a form – a bot will take (not much time) to complete the form where as a human being will take slightly longer, say anything over 5s.

Surely if we just check to make sure the form hasn’t been completed at in-human speeds we know if it’s a bot? If the form is somehow completed very quickly we can fall back to captcha, but for Pete’s sake – let’s stop using captcha by default.