Captcha is impossible to read most times

[stompey]

I left a website last night after 8 attempts at trying to figure out
what I was supposed to be typing in. I have 20/10 eyesight and am a
published poet and author so I know a lot of words. This was not the
first time this has happened. I joined this forum for the sole purpose
of letting you know that there are a lot of people who resent captcha.
My wife has poor eyesight. She won't even try to get on a site with
captcha. It's not all it is cracked up to be.

[tom wible]

On Sep 30, 2010, at 11:48 AM, stompey wrote:

> My wife has poor eyesight. She won't even try to get on a site with

i haven't tried the audio, but isn't that satisfactory?

[Steve Smith]

I run a business, and although I sympatise with you dear sir, I had no
choice in the matter, however, I did see a solution to your problem in
my wordpress software that could be made available. It would allow all
registered, confirmed human, users to use the site after using the
Recaptcha entry only once.

[Ian]

Hiya

My eyesight isn't too bad but I have to agree with you. The quality of
challenges seems to have dropped considerably over the last year. Now,
half the time, it's upside-down numbers and punctuation. I can deal
with the foreign words and understand they need digitising as well.
But how anyone is supposed to enter upside-down, back-to-front
punctuation is beyond me. It can take me 8 or nine goes before I get
anything I can even guess at.

And that's not a bitch from an end-user. I actually create websites
and put it on all the 'contact' pages that I implement. I obviously
have to test those contact pages and it can take forever.

Half my clients are asking me to take it off, as their customers can't
deal with it and they could be losing business.

Just my $0.02.

Cheers

Ian

[Aliquip]

I completely agree that the readability of the recaptcha captchas is
going down hill. Quite often i find myself making mistakes and having
to enter a recaptacha multiple times.

When recaptcha started the captchas were clear, but nowadays the
words
are deliberately distorted. I understand this is done to prevent bots
from deciphering the captcha. However, where recaptches used to be
one
of the more pleasant captchas to deal with, nowadays they're just as
much, if not more, a pain to enter.

Maybe a solution would be to allow websites using recaptcha to choose
beween an original version (no distortion, strike throughs, etc) and
an "enhanced" version? That way, sites wanting the utmost protection
could opt for the enhanced version while others use the original
version.

On a side note: Personally i detest captchas and would never advise a
website to use them (except maybe during account creation). A website
that depends on visitor participation should not put up artificial
barriers to such participation. There are better methods to prevent
spam that users don't notice: Honeypots in forms or serverside
spamfiters/services are the ones that come to mind. To prevent bots
from harvesting data one could rate limit traffic per user (and block
ips / accounts that acces data in unnatural long running sessions) or
simply put that data in a member only area for registered users
(though that would still be an artificial barrier).

[Ian Private]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 3:53 PM, Aliquip <ali...@gmail.com> wrote:

On a site note: Personally i detest captchas and would never advise a

website to use them (except maybe during account creation). A website
that depends on visitor participation should not put up artificial
barriers to such participation. There are better methods to prevent
spam that users don't notice: Honeypots in forms or serverside
spamfiters/services are the ones that come to mind. To prevent bots
from harvesting data one could rate limit traffic per user (and block
ips / accounts that acces data in unnatural long running sessions) or
simply put that data in a member only area for registered users
(though that would still be an artificial barrier).

As I understand it (and I'm often wrong :)) it isn't so much to do with harvesting, it's more prevention of script-injection attacks.

Cheers

Ian

[tom wible]

On Oct 6, 2010, at 9:53 AM, Aliquip wrote:

> would never advise a website to use them

since i've installed recaptcha on a blog & contact form, spam has
gone from hundreds/month to 3...

i don't think they're too hard to read, and if so, just get a new 1...

[Aliquip]

On 6 okt, 16:10, Ian Private <ianj0...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As I understand it (and I'm often wrong :)) it isn't so much to do with
> harvesting, it's more prevention of script-injection attacks.
>
> Cheers
>
> Ian

I never considered that, but of course script injection would be
frustrated by captchas too. Though i think that would be the worst
possible way to prevent such attack. It would be safer to prevent them
by server-side code. Thus sanitize the data submitted or (preferably)
parse the data provide and build a new html sniped that only allows a
limited subset of html.

I belief that ;) The problem is, do you know how many valid comments
you missed because people gave up on the captcha? (I know i have given
up on submitting a form when a captcha told me i needed to retry. For
example read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/captchas-affect-on-conversion-rates)

[Patrick Breitenbach]

reCaptcha is definitely the worst since it is trying to achieve the
dual purpose of being a captcha and digitizing books. Captchas are
insulting enough to legitimate users that they should be designed
solely to be easy for the user and hard for bots. reCaptcha doesn't
even pretend to have this goal. Saying that reCaptcha is fine is an
indication of user hostility.

[Thad Zeledon]

what's that a bit arrogant and stupid, 

Website owners are pretty dumb as all they have to do is make a bunch of questions that are like "what is this website called"....."type in the following word" this then stops most bots as they will not be able to know the answers to these questions automatically thus destroying the whole automation thing.... oh wait if everybody did this recaptcher would be out of business better keep it quite then.

On Tuesday, October 12, 2010 11:42:48 PM UTC+1, Michael wrote:

LOL.  Works fine for me, guess I'm indicative of "user hostility".

As with most things in life, you can't please everyone all the time,
but the fact that many more (unspoken) are using ReCaptcha without
issue, seems to indicate what the problem is.

What, really, was the purpose of your post on here?  I mean, you have
decided that ReCaptcha is the worst Captcha service because of it's
good-will efforts.  So, what do you expect in response on here?  That
the Google Team is going to drop the good efforts and simply provide
you with a free Captcha service?  LOL

I tell you what.  You create a Captcha service that is outstanding and
let us all know how we can get it.....free, of course.





On Oct 12, 1:13 am, Patrick Breitenbach <pbreitenb...@gmail.com>

[Jens Heitzmann]

Sorry, but this is Bullshit.
A bot-programmer just needs to enter these answers ONCE into the bot, and done. This is not any kind of secure.

[er...@ohmcomm.com]

I'd prefer if administrators administrated.

Better yet, I'd prefer if google groups wasn't some unholy union of forums and mailing lists that makes email spam a problem on what I use as forums.

Its not eyesight problems either.  I have 18/16 (for those who don't know how it works, lower is better), and have to go through 3 or 4 before i get one that's marginally readable.

On Thursday, September 30, 2010 8:06:51 PM UTC-4, Michael wrote:

Apparently you don't seem to understand that there is two sides to
everything.

The fact is that Captcha is becoming more and more common is because
of spam, hackers, bots, etc.  Maybe you're not aware of what the
consequences of not having Captcha on a website are.  Maybe you prefer
that web developers or server administers just allow their sites/
servers be attacked and shut down from the attacks (hence you'd have
no site to go to at all).  If you were aware of why Captcha came
about, you would be a little more understanding and realize it isn't
just to make it hard on you (and that it IS "all it is cracked up to
be").

I find it hard to believe you have 20/10 eyesight, tried 8 refresh
attempts to pass Captcha (at least reCaptcha branded Captcha) and
failed.

I manage a site that receives millions of hits, and haven't had one
single complaint about it being too hard to pass...even with the
latest glitches.

In addition, as the other person said, that is what the audio is for.
Those that can't see well enough to type it can listen and type.

[Daniel Waine]

+1 for overly difficult to read. I am finding the audio version even more obtuse.

[Don Guvernment]

Because Google WANTs your phone number, that is why they make it impossible. Bots can read 98% of all captcha's currently so the only things captcha's are stopping is actual human currently.

[Don Guvernment]

Captch does not stop bots, maybe your not aware of the real stats in the world of bots and captcha's, but with such a HUGE site you must be....right...

On Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 6:06:51 PM UTC-6, Michael wrote:

Apparently you don't seem to understand that there is two sides to
everything.

The fact is that Captcha is becoming more and more common is because
of spam, hackers, bots, etc.  Maybe you're not aware of what the
consequences of not having Captcha on a website are.  Maybe you prefer
that web developers or server administers just allow their sites/
servers be attacked and shut down from the attacks (hence you'd have
no site to go to at all).  If you were aware of why Captcha came
about, you would be a little more understanding and realize it isn't
just to make it hard on you (and that it IS "all it is cracked up to
be").

I find it hard to believe you have 20/10 eyesight, tried 8 refresh
attempts to pass Captcha (at least reCaptcha branded Captcha) and
failed.

I manage a site that receives millions of hits, and haven't had one
single complaint about it being too hard to pass...even with the
latest glitches.

In addition, as the other person said, that is what the audio is for.
Those that can't see well enough to type it can listen and type.



On Sep 30, 10:48 am, stompey <stomp...@gmail.com> wrote:

[sl1331]

Wow, Google, come on already. Are robots that sophisticated that you have to show dark dark images or blurry, tiny pictures with signs or cars hiding behind trees? This is a bit over the top don't you think? I spend so much time trying to login to legit sites I am a user of because I keep failing the damn "find the signs". I feel like a 2 year old being asked if I can see the signs in the picture. Well, I could if you made them at least semi-visible. You've basically taken a nice product and turned it into a high security piece of crap where you need zoom capabilities to find everything you want us to find. Some pictures are so dark you can't see a thing so you just guess. I mean, really, what is the point of a super dark picture anyway? Do robots have trouble seeing in the dark? Well, 50+ year olds do too! Give me a freaking break. If robots are this sophisticated that they can out "see" humans, then we're all in trouble.

Given this has been ongoing since 2010 suggests Google could give a crap how difficult it is. I guess the engineers just snicker and pat themselves on the back that they created this awesome high security login test. Well, you're ticking a lot of legit users off and they're leaving sites (I have refused to use many of the sites I have the option of bowing out of because of the pain of logging in). And the report to the site's owner is probably: "we prevented another robot from getting in!" instead of "we just lost you another customer".