I think my ‘captcha’ batting average is 300 right now. Captchas are what we call those annoying boxes at the end of a form, or before you download a file. They show you a jumble of letters and numbers and you have to enter what it is. Apparently this is to circumvent non-human interaction with websites. In other words, to make sure no scripts, bots, or programs are automatically stealing all the concert tickets. Well, so far, I’m not getting any tickets either..
I’m pissed
As mentioned, I’ve probably fail as many captchas as I pass. You may disagree, but I seem to be a reasonably intelligent person. I figure I can do so much as read a few letters and numbers. Well, apparently not. It seems computers can read as well, if not, better than I can. So, of course, the captchas have to be much more confusing than my eyes could ever decypher. This is stupid — I’m wasting at least 30 seconds trying to read the thing, 15 being told I was wrong, and another 30 trying it again. Thanks, assholes.
I’m not alone
I can’t be. Seriously, others must be having trouble reading some of these. I’ve seen one where the characters are upside down; that takes a lot of energy to figure out. Especially when they warp the character a little. Then that crooked 2 looks like a crooked 5. Or, that sideways 7 could just be a fancy looking L. Oh, and then they throw in the overlay of more characters and numbers. Not only do those throw off computers, they get me too! I can’t tell light grey from slightly less grey. Thanks, assholes.
How to fix this
There are things out there that we could all recognize and interpret. Think of inkblots but a lot easier and a lot less quack. Perhaps we could look at an image of a tree. Or maybe of a famous person. Stuff we should all know.
Heck, why not turn it into a 4-second advertisement where I click, it tells me about a product and I type that product name in? What if we just sell logos and have people enter ‘coke’ instead of IKHJ21. Couldn’t we make this easier for everyone?
We probably could. Why we haven’t yet, I’m not sure. If anyone wants to start a third-party captcha provider feel free to drop me a line.
I hate them too, but its a good way to prevent bots
im thinking about adding one on my site but im using my picture and they have to guess what im doing on that photo and its effective because its case sensitive
There’s now a WordPress script that I’ve seen some people using (and sometimes its on a few other sites too) is where instead of getting you to enter a whole bunch of random letters and numbers (like you mentioned above) they just give you a simple mathematical problem. They give you an image with a simple equation such at ‘5 + 2 – 1’ and all you need to do is type in the answer and you’re done.
Yes; it’s easy for computers to do math, and it’s fairly easy for them to decode images into numbers — but obviously doing both is too hard; or maybe the coders can’t be bothered writing more script. Either way, it’s working… at the moment.
Ralph – you’re saying the action you’re doing has to be described case-sensitively? What’s an example of that?
zzap – Interesting concept. As you mention it still violates the fundamental issue here, a computer could still (easily) get past it by doing that math. I’m sure it definitely does slow them down, though!
I just want someone to make money off the idea and to make it easier for me. ;-)
Hi,
i’m testing my personal Captcha on one of my site, it’s pretty simple and i had never receive any complain/robots since.
– i made a code that add a random X caracters word (from 4 to 10)
– Paste the word and ask to tell me the X caracter (random too).
– The field is only 1 caracter and is easily tested.
Example:
To validate your post, enter the second letter of the word ‘scxrd’
Respondse:
‘c’
:)
Very clever, Dave. I like that idea…
I hate them and seldom get them right. I was told it was because I was dyslexic but I’m not too sure, a fair non-dyslexic still seem to fail.
Hmm; there seems to be many different concepts on how to stop the spambots… but how many actually work is the real question. Dave’s idea was good, though.
I’ve done a lot on this over the last year… You may (or may not) have heard of something called KittenAuth… That’s mine. It’s a pretty fresh (well it was when I came up with it) approach to the whole thing and it makes things a lot easier on the user.
In a block: the user picks 3-n pictures that belong to the same group out of a batch of photos. Analysing and comparing a large database is much harder for a computer than it is for a human, especially if you have thousands of images in your source batch.
Come and play with it.
Here are the relevant URLs:
Current project page: http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth
Test it (and send me an email): http://www.thepcspy.com/contact
As for releasing it.. *sigh* it keeps getting further and further behind… Mainly because the working version is the ASPNET copy and the PHP one is just an ass to get working with various CMSs… If anyone would like to help I’ll put some determined effort it and get source out to people.
For one of my sites, a phpBB-powered forum, I painted five fruits and ask the user to pick the cucumber. It stopped all those annoying spam-bots, but I suppose it won’t be long until they start recognising images.
I like when it’s “smenita” or “kablammo” or something like that. I find that if I try to pronounce the word during the time-wasting period you mentioned it not only passes the time, but also puts me in a jovial mood when a vowel-less captcha thingy produces comical sound effects. I think that’s the most effective way to solve this problem.
Wow, these are all great solutions. Good to see some creativity.
I try to pronounce them, too, Emma. Klemthreeyouareseven is my favorite.
I also loathe captchas. The captchas on digg are horrible, they look simple yet I fail about 50% of them. We have reached a point where it’s not just hard for bots to post on forums, but also for humans. And I have very good eyes, I can’t even imagine what a horror it must be if your vision is even a little bit impaired.
Captchas also suck because it suffices to write an algorithm to crack one type of captcha, in order to spam all the sites that use that kind of standard captcha.
The best alternative to captchas is a customized protection that’s unique to your site, and that’s easy to modify in case a bot would be programmed to enter the correct answer. On my site I used a very simple trick: a field with a very attractive name in the HTML code, which must be left empty. A mouse trap, in other words. Combined with some other simple tests (like respecting of the maxlength and so on), it works incredibly well.
However, It’s nice to post ideas here, but it’s much nicer to use your own custom thing than try to make one of these ideas a new standard. Making a protection standard is a sure way to kill it.
Anything based on images is both harder to make and hard for people with vision disabilities. Simple text-based things work just as well. For instance, you can just ask “Enter the sixth word in this very sentence.” Or “I have a banana, a ballpoint and a car. Which is the largest?” Once bots can interpret and solve these kind of arbitrary problems, I guess they’ll also try to kill us and take over the world.