It seems its not just me but quite a few people who are not too fond of CAPTCHA. Author of the post linked below has come up with a neat trick to avoid spam without using CAPTCHA. He makes use of the fact that humans are more intelligent than bots; but without asking the site visitor to recognize weird looking letters and enter them in a text field. Instead he creates a simple text field and makes it hidden using CSS, so to human eye it wont be visible but when a bot fills the form it would fill in this field too, as this field has been made invisible from CSS not HTML attribute. In the end he checks if this field has any value then ignores it as spam.
http://freecodesnippet.com/articles/security/preventing-spam-on-your-website-without-using-captcha/
