Comments on: Can we please kill the Captcha

By: Kevan

Kevan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:29:33 +0000

Those codes are sooooooo freaken annoying. im blind so i cant read the damn things anyway, and sometimes the site got a link for an audio code but it freezes my computer sometimes. Some sites dont even have the audio code. Screw those *ssholes. There are other ways of recognizing a human from a computer, like asking a question.

By: d

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:14:00 +0000

By: Claptrap

Claptrap — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:18:28 +0000

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!

By: bikeman

bikeman — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:21:36 +0000

arrrrgghhh

and don’t get me onto forums that require ever more secure passwords!!!!!!!!!!!!

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:33:41 +0000

The only trouble with the Brittney Spears challenge response above is that there was no “All of the above” option…

By: george bush

george bush — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:26:29 +0000

@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

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:26:59 +0000

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.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:23:46 +0000

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.

By: Conrad

Conrad — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:56:46 +0000

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.

By: Strangely

Strangely — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:51:24 +0000

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.