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Worst CAPTCHA Ever

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Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#101

Post by nostrademons »

Evbn wrote: post #95
nostrademons wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or ones that make you confirm an e-mail address by entering it twice. The reason you confirm a password is because you can't see the password, and so you never know if you mistyped it. Confirming an e-mail address, in a normal text field, is just stupid busywork.

It is a protection against typos, because people are lazy and error-prone and it matters because getting it wrong means email delivery fails, whereas a misspelled name is no big deal. So, elegantly, two different issues use the same simple solution.

It's not elegant at all - it makes the user do extra work at signup. Wasn't there an interesting blog post on HN about 5 years ago that showed that each additional field you add to the registration form cuts sign-ups in half?

The better solution is to send an e-mail with a confirmation link upon signup. This also protects against deliberately falsified e-mails, and against typing it incorrectly twice, and against folks who automatically copy & paste when they see "Confirm your..." And it's only a tab switch and click rather than having to key in a few dozen characters, which matters even more in the brave new mobile/tablet world.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#102

Post by wubbfindel »

drostie wrote: post #81
fakeer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

Fun tip: reCAPTCHA is actually two things, the "re" and the "CAPTCHA". In other words, one half is about testing that you're not a human, while the other half is a legitimately unknown word from a source of failed optical character recognition. You actually don't have to get the latter one anything close to right; and I think you're given the option of at least one typo in the actual CAPTCHA test. So when a CAPTCHA l…

Thanks to this we will now be plagued with ebooks using the word "balls" instead of correct words.

Hilarity ensues.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#103

Post by nostrademons »

improv32 wrote: post #85
nostrademons wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or ones that make you confirm an e-mail address by entering it twice. The reason you confirm a password is because you can't see the password, and so you never know if you mistyped it. Confirming an e-mail address, in a normal text field, is just stupid busywork.

Or when you enter bad login info, and the site doesn't tell you if it was your email or your password. But on the reset password form it tells you when you put a bad email in.

Well, that's usually a security feature so that hackers can't harvest valid accounts by trying e-mail addresses and seeing what the error message is. It's stupid if they can do that anyway via the password reset form, though (although presumably, if you get the password reset e-mail you'll have an idea that someone else is trying to access your account).

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#104

Post by nostrademons »

saraid216 wrote: post #91
stan_rogers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is valid in HTML, and different from . It's actually being used correctly here.

It's valid, but it's one of those things that shows they're not a web developer. We don't use or anymore. That's what CSS is for.

FWIW, Google Search still uses tags for byte-saving reasons. Search terms are all bolded, and the page would become significantly heavier if those were or tags instead of .

(There's some crazyness where they actually become tags in China and are styled differently, because Chinese typographical conventions avoid bolding characters and instead turn them red for emphasis. I tried to simplify this once and do everything via CSS, but it turns out to be quite complicated because you also have to handle the case of interface text that's not in Chinese and supposed to be bolded, and exceptions for single-character words, and mixed English/Chinese text, and other languages like Arabic that run RTL, and mixed Arabic/English text, and presumably mixed Arabic/Chinese text though I've never seen such a page. It turns out CSS is fairly limited when you get into the complexities of human typographical conventions across the globe.)

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#105

Post by stan_rogers »

Evbn wrote: post #97
zopticity wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, you're wrong. is actually still being used to differentiate between . is used for accessibility reasons (making the words enunciate with emphasis, while just makes the words bold by default). If you want to bold a part of the sentence without having emphasis, you'll need to use .

What's the difference between and . Em is for emphasis.

is for intonational emphasis, the way you'd give a little extra stress on a word when you are speaking. is an indicator of importance, and may not correspond to intonational emphasis in spoken language.

As for the older tags, they were deprecated in XHTML, but have been redeemed in HTML 5. is used for elements that are traditionally set it italics but are neither emphasized nor citations. Often that will be foreign words (where one ought to use a lang attribute). Similarly is used to indicate elements that are traditionally set in bold face, but which do not indicate importance (as headings or in running text would do). Both are better than the semantically-meaningless tag, and vastly better than misusing the , and tags for their presentation effects.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#106

Post by spoiler »

anoncow wrote: post #94
drostie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun tip: reCAPTCHA is actually two things, the "re" and the "CAPTCHA". In other words, one half is about testing that you're not a human, while the other half is a legitimately unknown word from a source of failed optical character recognition. You actually don't have to get the latter one anything close to right; and I think you're given the option of at least one typo in the actual CAPTCHA test. So when a CAPTCHA l…

> try doing the possible half and typing in "balls" for the other half That doesn't help with the digitization of books. :)

But it helps us! :P

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#109

Post by jpdoctor »

LOL. So someone is doing automated lookups on the D&B site, they noticed, and then they put a broken captcha on the site.

Really, the only thing wrong with this picture is that they got called out on HN, so now whoever is doing the automated lookups won't be able to kill off D&B by releasing their information.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#110

Post by krapp »

niggler wrote: post #89
dEnigma wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio captchas are pretty hard to solve for me personally, much harder than even almost unreadable Captchas. But maybe that's just me. Still can't imagine a bot solving the audio captchas I've heard though. Edit: Just listen to it: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/demo/

That is awful. In most of the triplets, the middle sound is completely drowned out by the noise

That may have to do with it having been hacked before: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-bro...
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