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Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

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Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#81
What about PoW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system) ?

It require minimum user interaction, and you will eliminate most of spammers bot, since it will lose its cost-effectiveness. You can implement something like coin-hive proof-of-work, without having to mine monero anyway

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#82
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only have anecdata of course but so far I've had a 100% success rate. I imagine this will come down eventually but for the past ~year or so it's been working fine to just hide the honeypot field with CSS

I'm glad it's worked for one of us at least.

I don't know if it helps any but I've been using a field that looks real.

Depending on where it is the name= would be surname (where the form submission has a name field rather than a first name surname split), website, url, etc

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#83
post #21

I had a strange idea about solving this problem: How about a micro-payment, something like $0.01, instead of solving a puzzle? In that case maybe you won't care if many bots login to your website. I think that I by this time I have the technology to make something like this work, I was wondering if this is a good solution though. What do you think?

You have no idea how often I've shouted at my monitor that I would rather pay the site hoster a one-time fee than use google captcha ever again, and I really wish more sites offered this.

Say what you want about the site, but 4chans pass method of payment, which just removes all the captcha's when posting and lowers the post timer, was a fantastic idea, and just works.

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#84
post #32

For 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…

If you work in the Ruby ecosystem at all, there is a gem called invisible_captcha that does just this. It beat back most of the bot signups we were getting, though some still slip through occasionally. https://github.com/markets/invisible_captcha

Note that that library is not accessible and is hence illegal to use for most websites in the US. I've raised an issue on the project [1].

[1] https://github.com/markets/invisible_captcha/issues/52

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#85
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you're filtering out bots and people with disabilities?

Nope, screen readers (usually?) ignore elements with "display: none". To be sure, you could add aria-hidden="true", which I'd guess most bots don't recognize. http://alistapart.com/article/now-you-see-me/

Many don't just use display:none but position text off-screen or make it tiny or use sizing and overflow:hidden. I've seen a blind user be tripped up by these, so yes, it often also filters out disabled users.

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#86

Depends on why you need it. Captchas work well for telling humans from bots for the purpose of denying automated/scripted access. But here a simple IP-based blacklist works well, because of how many bots now live on Amazon's properties and some such. You don't need a captcha to filter out bot spam . That's a massive overkill. stopforumspam.com works well. You can combine it with a simple keyword based filter, have it…

"there's no spam that doesn't try to promote something" is, unfortunately, not true. Or at least, some spam plays the long con. On sites where karma or social graph confers advantage, bots will harvest one or both through low-effort, high-payoff posts. Various disinformation and distraction campaigns may sell only confusion, discord, or volume of content. And if it's the graph itself or specific connections which matter, ossiby for hishing, recruitment, or other compromise, you'll see other behaviours.

Not all media manipulation is commercial. Not by a long shot.

You're fighting the last war, if not older.

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#87
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hide it with CSS, not type='hidden'

It really doesn't matter. display:none or position:absolute;left:-1000px makes little difference. Honey pots only catch a small number of bots.

I just removed Google's ReCaptcha for a honeypot solution with an additional name and url field. But there's also a timer which checks how long it takes you to submit the form. If you can fill out everything in <2s, you're most likely not human. I have to figure out how people with disabilities can use the page though. Good to get a reminder here. So far it performs way better than ReCaptcha, I haven't received any spam so far and plenty of ham of course. No human complaints either.

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#88
post #39

W3C has published an extensive list of reCAPTCHA alternatives: https://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ W3C is requesting feedback for the document, if you'd like to make suggestions, please open an issue: https://github.com/w3c/apa/issues

Thanks; commented - https://github.com/w3c/apa/issues/28

Re: Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

#90
post #77
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you're filtering out bots and people with disabilities?

Unfortunately I've not given thought to people with disabilities in this case. It's an oversight and that's on me. I wonder if bots are smart enough to figure out aria-hidden="true". Possibly empty it out using javascript on submit. I would guess a bot not using CSS would also not be using javascript? Unsure, would need testing.

Could we just tell the people with screen readers to ignore it?
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