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Have CAPTCHA's gotten too crazy?

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Stargazer43
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20 Mar 2012, 6:53 pm

I was just curious if anyone else feels that CAPTCHA's have become "too intense". I was trying to register for a web site earlier today, and it took me a good 20min just to figure out the CAPTCHA thing! I must have hit the refresh button over 100 times lol. Some web sites have ones that are pretty easy to read or do, but I find more and more sites are using incredibly complex and crazy ones that are near impossible to get. The worst is the ones with a giant ink blot in the middle of the words lol. Even if you hit the audio button, the sound they make is so distorted and strange that it's impossible to make any sense from it. I put an image of one below to illustrate my point...one of the words is really easy to see but the other is a total jumbled mess.

For those who don't know what these are, it's the things that appear sometimes when you register or use web sites, where a highly distorted image is shown and you have to type out the letters displayed in the image.

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ktbug
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20 Mar 2012, 7:01 pm

I agree with you, I have a terrible time with the captchas. I keep refreshing it until there's one I can read. They drive me mad!



Asp-Z
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20 Mar 2012, 7:07 pm

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Jory
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20 Mar 2012, 7:23 pm

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Madbones
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20 Mar 2012, 7:48 pm

Yes!
Sometimes I cant register to sites because it looks like a smudged to hell mess to the point where I cant read it.


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20 Mar 2012, 7:51 pm

When my 60+ year old father logged into Yahoo to check his mail he was greeted with Captcha. His first words were, "What is this? What do all these distorted letters and numbers mean?" It took a few minutes to figure it out.



Apple_in_my_Eye
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20 Mar 2012, 10:00 pm

I agree. At some point computer recognition of those is going to exceed the human brain's ability to decode them. Maybe we're at that point already.



HoodedShadow
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21 Mar 2012, 1:34 pm

Its supposed to be that users can read them, computers can't but.. Its the other way right now, computers (bots) can read them just fine, but humans can't.

For example, I got this captcha recently and.. See for yourself,
Image


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21 Mar 2012, 1:53 pm

HoodedShadow wrote:
For example, I got this captcha recently and.. See for yourself,
Image

In these type of captchas you only need to get one word correct, your input for the other word is used by Google for their book transcribing technology.

Whenever you get words that use a different character set from the standard English alphabet, then that's the word that you don't need to enter correctly and you can enter whatever you want for it.



TM
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21 Mar 2012, 2:11 pm

I've found them annoying since they first popped up, is there really no other way to stop bots from signing up? It's getting to the point of child proof lighters and child proof pill bottles here, a kid has no problem using the lighter and opening the bottle, I on the other hand can't get my painkillers out to treat the hand that's worn to a stub from trying to open that lighter.



Stargazer43
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21 Mar 2012, 2:18 pm

TM wrote:
I've found them annoying since they first popped up, is there really no other way to stop bots from signing up? It's getting to the point of child proof lighters and child proof pill bottles here, a kid has no problem using the lighter and opening the bottle, I on the other hand can't get my painkillers out to treat the hand that's worn to a stub from trying to open that lighter.


LOL I love your analogy



aspi-rant
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21 Mar 2012, 2:35 pm

Stargazer43 wrote:
I was just curious if anyone else feels that CAPTCHA's have become "too intense". I was trying to register for a web site earlier today, and it took me a good 20min just to figure out the CAPTCHA thing! I must have hit the refresh button over 100 times lol. Some web sites have ones that are pretty easy to read or do, but I find more and more sites are using incredibly complex and crazy ones that are near impossible to get. The worst is the ones with a giant ink blot in the middle of the words lol. Even if you hit the audio button, the sound they make is so distorted and strange that it's impossible to make any sense from it. I put an image of one below to illustrate my point...one of the words is really easy to see but the other is a total jumbled mess.

For those who don't know what these are, it's the things that appear sometimes when you register or use web sites, where a highly distorted image is shown and you have to type out the letters displayed in the image.

Image

Uploaded with ImageShack.us


the reason it is that hard is that you actually try to decipher something real…. and no computer is able to solve and needs a human eye to solve…

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

so keep trying!! !! do your best… it is for a very good cause!



aspi-rant
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21 Mar 2012, 2:37 pm

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4[/youtube]



Asp-Z
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21 Mar 2012, 5:00 pm

aspi-rant wrote:
Stargazer43 wrote:
I was just curious if anyone else feels that CAPTCHA's have become "too intense". I was trying to register for a web site earlier today, and it took me a good 20min just to figure out the CAPTCHA thing! I must have hit the refresh button over 100 times lol. Some web sites have ones that are pretty easy to read or do, but I find more and more sites are using incredibly complex and crazy ones that are near impossible to get. The worst is the ones with a giant ink blot in the middle of the words lol. Even if you hit the audio button, the sound they make is so distorted and strange that it's impossible to make any sense from it. I put an image of one below to illustrate my point...one of the words is really easy to see but the other is a total jumbled mess.

For those who don't know what these are, it's the things that appear sometimes when you register or use web sites, where a highly distorted image is shown and you have to type out the letters displayed in the image.

Image

Uploaded with ImageShack.us


the reason it is that hard is that you actually try to decipher something real…. and no computer is able to solve and needs a human eye to solve…

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

so keep trying!! !! do your best… it is for a very good cause!


In theory, yes, but I used to run a forum using Recaptcha and I got loads of spambots registering until I installed an extension which barred certain e-mails and IPs.



scubasteve
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21 Mar 2012, 7:17 pm

HoodedShadow wrote:
Its supposed to be that users can read them, computers can't but.. Its the other way right now, computers (bots) can read them just fine, but humans can't.

For example, I got this captcha recently and.. See for yourself,
Image


Wow... I swore off all websites using capchas years ago. And that was when they were in English...

Whoever came up with these things should be tarred and feathered. They are the scourge of the internet.



MyFutureSelfnMe
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25 Mar 2012, 3:47 pm

10 years ago these things were an effective way to filter out spambots. These days they are virtually useless and I think we're experiencing the last generation of them before they're abandoned.