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there are serval problems with captchas so they should not been used without thinking about the disadvantages.
the most important problems are that professional spambots can read the most visual captchas without problems (keep in mind, your email spam protection also can read image mails) and for non-sighted users (for example blind users, or the color blind on a color-using test), visual captchas present serious problems.
there are some experiments on new captcha technologies.something like math calculations the user must work out or ASCII banners als captchas.
be sure,all these techniques just work till the spambots learn how to crack it.