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Worst CAPTCHA Ever

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Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#51

Post by reeses »

fakeer wrote: post #44
_ikke_ wrote: post #2

Well, it is a good way to tell computers and humans apart. Computers can read it, while humans can't. They should reject corectly filled in captchas.

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.

It started so well, as a tool to harness collective 'intelligence' to digitize text while preventing spam. Now you're right, even the bloody accessible (audio) versions are useless. It's as if a dozen poltergeists are whispering in your ear, and you have to pick out the one that matters.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#52

Post by krapp »

Eliezer wrote: post #41

Wow. That's... we're lucky Homo sapiens didn't get its intelligent species license revoked for this.

The notice of our species' Sapience Rating revocation has been on display at our local planning department on Alpha Centauri for 50 years now....

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#53

Post by unclebucknasty »

rytis wrote: post #9
codesuela wrote: post #5

While this captcha is truly a display of ignorance I could imagine that "corporate developers" at D&B aren't web developers. All I am saying is that if you force me to write enterprise software (which I have zero experience with) on a tight schedule I'm probably going to make a stupid mistake or two even though I hope I am not of "lower quality". I imagine someone in management refused to hire web devs because "we've…

What is this thing that people call "enterprise software"?

It is exactly the type of software you'd expect to be developed by huge, lumbering, beauracratic corporations.

Several years ago when I was doing contract enterprise development work for various Fortune companies, EJB was all the rage in the Enterprise Java space. I started to feel a little rate pressure, so figured I'd better at least pick up a book and get up to speed.

About 3 chapters into it, I couldn't believe how bad it was (especially entity beans). I mean, it was almost like the perfect anti-pattern. Anyway, that didn't stop massive numbers of enterprises from jumping in head first, because it was sold as "the way" to do enterprise development. The tooling and app servers were insanely expensive too. But many IT managers didn't want to take any chances on not going the standard route.

Anyway, that about sums up enterprise software. Even for groups not into EJB specifically, the culture and thinking are the same. There is this meme that enterprise software must be more robust or scalable, etc., but the funny part is that consumer facing Web apps must typically be far more robust and dynamically scalable to serve much larger user bases. Enterprise software is typically run in a more tightly controlled environment too (specified required browser and OS, Intranet-based, etc.).

Yet, just labeling something "Enterprise" and targeting it as such, seems to command a premium.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#54

Post by kristofferR »

fakeer wrote: post #44
_ikke_ wrote: post #2

Well, it is a good way to tell computers and humans apart. Computers can read it, while humans can't. They should reject corectly filled in captchas.

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.

I actually think reCAPTCHA has gotten quite good actually after they switched one of the words to a street address. Just look at the examples in this post, most are pretty easy to decode right away.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-...

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#55

Post by kevin_p »

d23 wrote: post #30

Funny coincidence, I ran into this on another website yesterday. And if it weren't bad enough that it was printed in plain text in the source code, it was only checked client side with javascript. Seriously?

Just because something is checked client-side doesn't mean it's only checked client-side. I've used JS checking on anti-bot questions[1] quite deliberately: it doesn't have any effect on 99%+ of bots, but it stops posts by humans from accidentally being flagged as spam.

[1] admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot"[2] rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather silly.

[2] if this is what you meant by a "printed in plain text in the source code" question, remember that most spambots aren't customised to an individual site, they just roam the internet submitting their crap to anything that looks like a comment form. Sure, it's trivial to write a script to parse the page and find the answer to the question - but nobody's actually going to do that for a typical company's "Contact Us" form. Adding this sort of check cuts down on spam enormously (from hundreds a day to zero), and is way easier for humans than solving a captcha.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#58

Post by __david__ »

kevin_p wrote: post #55
d23 wrote: post #30

Funny coincidence, I ran into this on another website yesterday. And if it weren't bad enough that it was printed in plain text in the source code, it was only checked client side with javascript. Seriously?

Just because something is checked client-side doesn't mean it's only checked client-side. I've used JS checking on anti-bot questions[1] quite deliberately: it doesn't have any effect on 99%+ of bots, but it stops posts by humans from accidentally being flagged as spam. [1] admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot"[2] rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather…

> admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot" rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather silly.

This is not silly. This works extremely well for the low traffic forum I run. Since there are a huge number of phpbb3 forums out there, spammers have made spam bots specifically targeting the platform. If you make your forum epsilon different from the default then the bots don't work without manual intervention. That's enough to keep you off of autospam lists for very, very long periods of time.

And when someone inevitably adds your extra form element to their spam bot (it's happened to me 2 or 3 times over about 6 years) then you just change the answer and it stops working (and they might not even notice since it's a bot).

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#59

Post by wilfra »

__david__ wrote: post #58
kevin_p wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something is checked client-side doesn't mean it's only checked client-side. I've used JS checking on anti-bot questions[1] quite deliberately: it doesn't have any effect on 99%+ of bots, but it stops posts by humans from accidentally being flagged as spam. [1] admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot"[2] rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather…

> admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot" rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather silly. This is not silly. This works extremely well for the low traffic forum I run. Since there are a huge number of phpbb3 forums out there, spammers have made spam bots specifically targeting the platform. If you make your forum epsilon different from the default then the…

Same! I was getting 50+ spambots a day registering to my vbulletin forum, even with a really hard captcha. I changed it to a question any eight year old could answer and I instantly went to less than one spambot per week getting through. Easier for users and nearly eliminated my spam problem, win-win.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#60

Post by kevin_p »

__david__ wrote: post #58
kevin_p wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something is checked client-side doesn't mean it's only checked client-side. I've used JS checking on anti-bot questions[1] quite deliberately: it doesn't have any effect on 99%+ of bots, but it stops posts by humans from accidentally being flagged as spam. [1] admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot"[2] rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather…

> admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot" rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather silly. This is not silly. This works extremely well for the low traffic forum I run. Since there are a huge number of phpbb3 forums out there, spammers have made spam bots specifically targeting the platform. If you make your forum epsilon different from the default then the…

Updated to be clearer about this. I meant that fake captchas like the one in the OP (which put HTML text on top of a confusing background image to make it harder to read) were silly, not simple question checks.
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