Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
201–207 of 207 posts
Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
#202Unless your website is under targeted attack just putting "2+3" on a image will block 99.9% of all bots. You hardly even have to distort the image or randomize the math but doing so could help against script kiddies. Only drawback vs reCAPTCHA is you have to show the captcha all the time instead of automatically suspecting bots.
If you are under targeted attack by someone more dedicated, captcha is not going to be the only defense in your book.
Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
#203Unless your website is under targeted attack just putting "2+3" on a image will block 99.9% of all bots. You hardly even have to distort the image or randomize the math but doing so could help against script kiddies. Only drawback vs reCAPTCHA is you have to show the captcha all the time instead of automatically suspecting bots. If you are under targeted attack by someone more dedicated, captcha is not going to be th…
> Unless your website is under targeted attack just putting "2+3" on a image will block 99.9% of all bots.
Absolutely.
I did exactly that with a PHP script which generated images with the GD library.
It definitively worked for me.
Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
#204I think reCaptcha is very terrible. For HTML forms, a simple question could be used (change them sufficiently often when spam is received), or you may require the user to edit the URL manually in order to access something, based on the client IP address perhaps (which would be displayed). I also invented a protocol-independent CAPTCHA, which is also text-based, and uses SASL. You should allow the user to implement the code themself if they want to do rather than requiring that they use your code.
Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
#205In my personal blog I am using "Riddler" Drupal module, and have had good experience: https://www.drupal.org/project/riddler You can create your own Captcha questions / answers. I feel like this is the preferred way of handling spam posts, creating your own custom Captcha implementation.
This is what I do on my own sites too. Of course, given some bots relay the captchas to humans, this arguably works best for a site with a specific niche in mind, since they can ask a significantly more difficult question that only someone interested in the topic would know. Like say, how a PhD maths related community or blog might ask a university level maths question, a chess forum may ask a chess related one and o…
https://lichess.org/password/reset is a fun example.
Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
#206A bit late, but honorable mention: https://xkcd.com/233/
Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?
#207For bots which are not specifically targeted at your page i simply add an invisible form element named url. Bots _LOVE_ to share their viagra urls. Any request which submitted an url is discarded. This trick is simple stupid and should not work but somehow the simple spam bots have not improved. This does not work for sophisticated bots (never met one) or the ones programmed specifically for your site (happens very r…
Be very careful how you do this, unless you want to exclude blind users. I've seen a blind user have an online form silently fail at them because they filled in a field that wasn't visible. Using display:none applied indirectly via CSS is probably reasonably effective against bots and won't interfere with screen-readers.
I wonder if using aria-hidden on the input field would work or if the bots would also ignore it.