Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk
Posted on February 2nd, 2009 by Stuart Turton
Can we please kill the Captcha
Right I’ve had enough. Captcha codes are now officially the most irritating thing I’ve ever encountered, and this is from a man who grew up with a little sister.
Captcha codes, for anybody not au fait with this peculiar torment, are the codes you have to enter to add comments to blogs or download things, or pretty much do any of the hundred little tasks that make the internet worthwhile. If you’re particularly keen to see one, it’s the thing that will bug you before you post a comment on this here blog. They’re intended to stop bots from signing up for millions of email addresses and swamping the planet in a Viagra blizzard. Essentially, they’re the gatekeepers to the online world, and they’re bloody irritating.
At what point did Captcha’s lords and masters decide that making them completely indecipherable was the way forward? If anything, Captchas have made me side with the bots. We have a common enemy, and if a bot can read the squiggles and inkblots that make up a modern Captcha code, then good for them. It deserves the email account. I’ll throw it a parade. Personally, I can’t even begin to comprehend the damn things. Captcha codes are long past telling humans from bots, they’re now only useful for judging the psychological state of the person entering the comment.
I reckon that’s why most commentators on blogs and forums are so rude and abusive. They’re probably perfectly placid before they get to the Captcha; just ready to make some lovely comment about the weather or the football, but five minutes of infuriating code bashing later and they’re psychopaths.
I remember receiving a letter from a reader on this very subject and palming him off with some vague reasoning that Captchas are the best solution to a tricky problem. I was wrong. I apologise to him profusely. It’s this kind of appeasement that got Neville Chamberlain in trouble, and I won’t tolerate it. Captchas are my nemesis and I want them destroyed. Replaced with something else, anything else. Hell, I’d rather offer a blood sample every time than enter another Captcha.
Clearly, I’m at breaking point. I was driven to this in my attempts to sign up for a Yahoo account. At the end of the information form I was asked to confirm that I had a soul by entering a Captcha. I got it wrong and the entire form reset. That happened three times. Three times of re-entering the same flipping information and smashing into the same aggravating roadblock. Even gangsters stop after breaking three of your fingers, but Captchas never stop. Ever.
Now admittedly, given that the snow has reduced London to a cannibalistic war zone, with its once happy residents huddled in their homes with shotguns – or so the news would have you believe – there are bigger problems that Captchas. But, the devil doesn’t send you to hell with one big blowout, it’s the general drip feed of daily irritants that send your twitchy fingers creeping towards the axe. Please tell me this isn’t just me. Please tell me I’m not alone in hating the little buggers. Please, tell me I’m not going mad. Please…
Tags: Captcha codes
Posted in: Rant, View from the Labs
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23 Responses to “ Can we please kill the Captcha ”
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February 2nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Bit ironic then that I had to reload the Captcha on this website several times before I could leave this comment
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Ok, assuming I can get this past the captcha (oh, the irony…) here’s my 2p.
Yes, they’re annoying, but the main problem seems to be Yahoo’s crappy design in having the entire form reset on failure, rather than the 30 seconds or so you’ve spend trying to decipher the captchas.
It seems to me that the recaptcha system used here (and elsewhere) is marginally better than most others in that
a) it seems easier to read. The accidentally distorted letters in old books are easier to decipher than those intentionally distorted by some algorithm that has to be complex enough to defeat the bots.
b) it seems to me like a small social service on my part. I’ve even visited the recaptcha site to see if I could spend 5 minutes downtime doing a few more, but unless I missed something I’ll have to keep posting here and doing something useful as a by-product of that instead.
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
There just has to be a better way – even crappy Virgin Media’s email service has you filling one out if you dare to send an email to five or more people. The service is rubbish to begin with…
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
You’re absolutely right, there are bigger problems. Now move on and get a life!
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:58 pm
The thing is, from a technical point of view, there’s really no need for Captchas.
There are techniques that can be used to determine whether a form has been completed by a bot or a human being. One of the simplest is time – it has probably taken me a minute and a half to write and then edit this message. A bot would have done it in a fraction of a second.
I look after several very large websites, which have public facing forms etc. And none have Captchas.
Frankly, they are just a sign of lazy and unimaginative technical design.
P.
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
@benmully exactly, I always have to refresh several times to get one I can decipher… any chance we’ll see them disappear from Dennis websites? Does that depends on finding a suitable alternative?
Also like the option to listen to the captcha… that doesn’t play the audio at all!
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Captcha: “Jimmy Postmaster”?
Bots are not the only things that take a second to fill out a form. My girlfriend uses autocomplete in her web browser (to make life easier for the data-harvesting trojans!)
But they have to be getting something wrong when most humans can’t get past it. Maybe xkcd have got the answer http://xkcd.com/233/
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Completely OT, but did you really mean to use “ofay” at the start of the 2nd paragraph? According to the Google definition that’s “used as a disparaging term for a white person”
I suspect you actually meant “au fait”…
February 2nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Graham – yes I did. I blame the lapse on the snow.
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:20 pm
So… on a topical note, are ‘Viagra Blizzards” measured in… inches?
I’ll get my coat. And my snowshoes. And my 4WD.
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:32 am
What is really annoying is, when PC Pro first introduced the Recaptcha on this site, I run NoScript, which has PC Pro as an exception and lets it run JavaScript, but Recaptcha wasn’t.
I entered my comment, clicked submit and it was rejected, without an error message! There was no mention that it required Recaptcha to be enabled and the recpatcha box wasn’t displayed…
February 3rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
the best alternative is to find something in a picture. For example present a 3 x 3 grid of 9 pictures. Only one picture with a cat in it, for example. repeat 3 times. A human will always get it right – a machine would only have 1 in 1000 chance of randomly guessing.
February 3rd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Its ironic that there is trade off here with usability and security. The next step for CAPTCHA maybe images, which crack the usability issues whilst retaining the verification properties of the original text version. Shameless plug, but have a look at it in action at : http://demo.vidoop.com/
February 5th, 2009 at 7:03 am
An alternative to image based captcha is posted here : http://rathercurious.net/archives/155. As Paul Ockendon suggests this technique relies on time plus delivery of codes via javascript. Whilst this code uses php the technique is portable to any server language.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:02 am
My personal favourites as alternatives are:
Simple maths problems that you have to type in the answer:
e.g. 8+3 = ?
Useful for both checking you are human AND that you have the required intelligence to make a useful post… just think… if they upgraded it to basic calculus, it would cut out all those replies with “lol” and so on…
My other favourite is the cheesy questions:
e.g. Britney Spears is a:
1. Pop singer
2. Brat toy
3. Type of vegetable.
Good for many reasons: the alternatives answers are always fantastic, and also people not knowing the answer can google it, unlike a bot!
February 5th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Paul Ockendon is right.
It follows on from a comment Matt Mullenweg (WordPress creator/instigator/driver) made about captcha some months ago. In essence, apart from the automated ‘bots’, hordes of poor 3rd world people are now employed to sit and manually enter captcha codes – it’s simple economics, being cheaper that way for the criminal gangs…
Looking at the source code for this page, it’s fair to assume that this blog runs WordPress and if so, there are better alternatives to Captcha in all it’s flavours.
Other commenters above have mentioned some techniques. My website(s) runs on WP and there are several plugins that will do all the hard work for you, rolling the various techniques into one package. I use one called SABRE written by a French guy. Because of the Captcha issue, I don’t use that setting at all but use arithmatic settings in combination with lists and java timing issues to trap the ‘bots’. It really does work very well. For the manual hacks I mentioned above, I suspect the sums are too hard for uneducated people to do, so without being disrespectful, it does join up the circle for that argument or perceived fact based on rumour. I don’t know how much truth is in all that, but I do know that SABRE and it’s ilk do their jobs very well without doing the user’s head in with incomprehensible squiggles.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I vote for blockers with cheesy questions, the bot can get in 30% of the time, but who cares – any bot-writter will just submit the form again instantly or just move along.
February 5th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Were you using Firefox? I has a good habit of remembering the values you entered should you need to hit the back button – unlike IE. Of course, there’s always the Google toolbar for IE and Firefox to remember most of the common values. It makes things like captcha resets less painful.
Of course, if the Yahoo application resets the form itself then it’s plainly badly designed and poorly tested… you’d expect more from an industry giant.
February 5th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Oh, at least when registering for an MSN account, though the phrase was indecipherable, there was an audio version for accessibility reasons, and I just found myself using that instead!
I agree with the simple sum or using something like colour + shape recognition.
February 5th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
@dave “My personal favourites as alternatives are:
Simple maths problems that you have to type in the answer:
e.g. 8+3 = ?
Useful for both checking you are human AND that you have the required intelligence to make a useful post… just think… if they upgraded it to basic calculus, it would cut out all those replies with “lol” and so on…”
LOL
February 6th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
The only trouble with the Brittney Spears challenge response above is that there was no “All of the above” option…
May 6th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
arrrrgghhh
and don’t get me onto forums that require ever more secure passwords!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 5th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Being dyslexic I find it sometimes very hard to read the captcha image and in many sites listening to it is even worse for any normal human being! Also, while I am not exactly uneducated I also suffer from calculia so anything beyond primary school maths is just as hard. (How I ever managed in university, I don’t know! lol)
At least this site has decent enough lettering and even the sound is way better than some other sites!