[reverend_gonzo]

For what it worth, I worked on a website that started receiving massive amounts of spam on its feedback page very shortly after it went live. We (as in the three programmers on the project) hated captchas with a assion. Instead we put in a field with the text "What is 1 + 1?" (If they missed it, we'd actually put in red next to it "Hint: the answer is '2'". (Granted, we checked the value server side.)

The end result, spam disappeared and we didn't add much pain to our customers.

Most spammers likely don't go check every website to see how they can break the captcha, they just set up a script to go fill out forms and submit them.

They're solution, while not being the "awesome, technologically advanced solution", if it prevented spam, was a working solution without the complexity of actual captchas.

Furthermore, as captchas have been known to be broken, who's to say that the spammers tool doesn't recognize valid, commly-used captchas and break them automatically? As opposed to a field that says "Type the following word", which the spammers don't (can't easily?) check for.