Live data from Hacker News

Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

dangerousminds.net

11–20 of 215 posts

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#11
i like this idea..! I am planning to open source my CAPTCHA research if any one interested please contact me ..! you can find my research on http://dndcaptcha.blogspot.com/2010/04/textareaid.html

You can find presentation of the same concept here: http://www.slideshare.net/desaiguddu/drag-and-drop-captcha-a...

If anyone of you are researching or preparing Survey presentation or educational research on CAPTCHA feel free to use the content from the presentation.

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#13

So, i can be a d*ck as long as i'm smart? Edit: I'm disturbed by the amount of grammar nazi's here that think the quality of someone's grammar reflects their personality... If the goal is to keep the conversation civilized, why not do something along the lines of "Doing X is a more nice thing to do".

I don't think it's really about being smart. Having a basic grasp of language so you can adequately articulate yourself in a conversation is critical to discussion. If you can't, then you probably shouldn't be taking part in the discussion anyway.

Too many people will spill there emotions into a discussion with sub standard spelling and grammar which makes it very difficult for others to understand them, which leads to inevitable misunderstandings.

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#14

this would also seem to discriminate against people who aren't native english speakers (or w/e other language).

It might discriminate in their favour. On average, foreign students I studied with had much better basic grammar than native English speakers.

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#16
This made me smile, but I don't think it would work. I suspect a lot of people could use the right form when asked outright like this (and as a last resort, they could Google it). The bigger problem is probably when people don't care whether they get it right or not when they're writing their comments.

[Pre-submit verification of 'there' homophones . . . . 100%].

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#18
post #3

In my experience simple, domain-specific CAPTCHAs work pretty well. They don't even need to include a frustrating image with hard-to-parse words. Just ask commenters a somewhat randomized question that any visitor to the site would be able to answer easily. It can be really, really simple - like for example asking them to enter the abbreviation for something: > Whats the abbreviation commonly used for the Hypertext T…

That would work well provided your site isn't a high traffic site.

Yes. The lower traffic your site is, the easier you can make the captcha. The truth is, most of us have pretty low traffic sites with no more than 100k hits per month, blogs for example. The key here is to have a simple but different captcha compared to the standard stuff. Pairing this strategy with a little bit of site-specific domain knowledge goes a long way towards discouraging trolls and idiots.

I think overall, bots would be negatively impacted by a more diverse captcha ecosystem even if the individual implementations are easier to crack. Spammers don't invest 10 or 20 minutes in cracking a domain-specific captcha system just so they can spam one single blog - they'd rather move on to thousands of sites that are protected by the same standard word reading puzzle. Of course, if your site rises into the upper strata of the web, you're also quickly entering a zone where the standard, hard-to-decipher image strategy isn't working so great anymore either.

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#19

this would also seem to discriminate against people who aren't native english speakers (or w/e other language).

I think native English speakers are more likely to make such mistakes. Non-native speakers usually know the difference between those words, because they have the ability to translate the words back into their native language to see the difference.

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#20
post #3

In my experience simple, domain-specific CAPTCHAs work pretty well. They don't even need to include a frustrating image with hard-to-parse words. Just ask commenters a somewhat randomized question that any visitor to the site would be able to answer easily. It can be really, really simple - like for example asking them to enter the abbreviation for something: > Whats the abbreviation commonly used for the Hypertext T…

That would work well provided your site isn't a high traffic site.

And that the question randomizes pretty well. Otherwise posts could be automated.
Post reply on HN