Is recapture starting to be a joke?

[Rubble]

I tried to get onto a site the other day and could not get past the recapture text question. This is one of the questions - out of interest are you supposed to input fullstops etc?



So I thought I would give the audio option a try - I have bad tinatus in one ear and not very good hearing in the other which is not a good start.

I was told to input the words - I only heard one word - so I played it two or three times and finaly heard the first word and it was either for or four and the second word was possably hail ( I am crap at spelling as well which does not help ).

Anyway the upshot was I left the site without logging in and came here to write this post !

[EastCoast]

If you get an unreadable one click the recaptcha refresh a couple times and you'll get a more readable one. No, you don't need to enter any punctuation. There's no doubt they increase bounce rate, but unfortunately there's so many bots out there filling forms full of nonsense they're necessary evil.

[Rubble]

I can understand your reply EastCoast but if you look at the capture text the first word is simple enough but the second word I could guess the first, second and sixth characters.
The third character no idea what that is and along with the forth and seventh character its partialy cut off the image.

What sort of quality is there if some of the characters are cut off the image ?

I did refresh the image a few times and there were probably a few more I could read than not read. So I could have logged in but I thought why bother its not important.

[JREAM]

recaptcha is a joke - but not as big a joke as googles captcha lol

[ferrari_chris]

I can understand your reply EastCoast but if you look at the capture text the first word is simple enough but the second word I could guess the first, second and sixth characters.
The third character no idea what that is and along with the forth and seventh character its partialy cut off the image.

What sort of quality is there if some of the characters are cut off the image ?

I did refresh the image a few times and there were probably a few more I could read than not read. So I could have logged in but I thought why bother its not important.

As I understand it, the first word is the "key" anyway.

You just need to get that one right.

They put the second word up as a trial, and rather than using it as a pass key, they merely collect people's attempt at the word. If the responses vary wildly, the word is too complex and they won't use it. If the vast majority enter the second word correctly, then it's readable so they add it to the list of "key" words.

I can't remember where I heard or read that they were using the technique.

So anyway, as long as you enter "source" correctly, you should be fine.

[Rubble]

Just been back and looked at the login again and the second font in the first image posted is the problem. I refreshed the captcha a few times and the font changes from one side to the other.

Anyway with this image - probably the worst I found - there is no way anyone will know the second word and I did my best and it went through so you may be correct with what you have read ferrari_chris.

[Salathe]

It appears that you only need to get correct, the word with the outlined letters ("Moromp" above) and any value for the other word (placed either before or after the target word as in the image) should suffice. So, reCAPTCHA would be fine with you submitting "Moromp a" for the image above.

I've also tried dozens of the audio tests and fail the vast majority (a run of 9 consecutive incorrect answers!).

[Force Flow]

How about this one? Looks like Greek to me

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/3...sgreektome.jpg

After a refresh, I got one I could actually read.

[Rubble]

As you say what chance do you have with the first word !

I suppose this could be another ploy as a bot would just give up but we now know that we only need to enter the one recognisable word

I wonder how users get on that are not using - can not think of the term for it - western characters ?

[rumen]

recaptcha (is it still free?) is actually one of the better captchas out there regarding resistance to being broken by bots. The tricky bit is balancing readability against security. There are lots of very easy to break captchas on dime-a-dozen type websites but they wouldn't give any self respecting hacker any great bragging rights. A robust captcha against bots is not simply slapping some plain text on an image.

[Lena.PSS]

Using the audio option sometimes is a "no" for it pronounce word/s like a robot talking and that you couldn't understand more. Recaptcha is a good tool but you can still refresh a page to get a more readable captchas.

[samanime]

I find captchas of all sorts annoying and that they chase away customers. I'd rather manually go through a few dozen spams to avoid missing one or two leads.

I find if you employ decent spam filters (like Askimet for WP, etc) it blocks enough of it already that it's not a huge deal.

[myseopandit]

I don't agree ,considering recapture a joke.Even though the second word seem to be not understood,there is a option been provided to try for the next easy ones.

[Chronister]

Sometimes with reCaptcha and other CAPTCHAs you just have to keep on refreshing until you get one that works. It's a shame that spam has made it so that users have to put up with that but I can't think of any alternatives. At least you didn't get a character from another language in yours. That has happened to me several times and I never understood what that was all about.

[Stevie D]

Sometimes with reCaptcha and other CAPTCHAs you just have to keep on refreshing until you get one that works. It's a shame that spam has made it so that users have to put up with that but I can't think of any alternatives. At least you didn't get a character from another language in yours. That has happened to me several times and I never understood what that was all about.

You can get some real oddities in reCaptcha. Because one of the words is a computer-generated word, and one is scanned in from a (usually historic?) document and then jiggled about a bit, there isn't always a lot of quality control on the scanned word. I've often had accented letters or punctuation, occasionally mathematical symbols and even had the whole word upside-down once or twice!

[Stomme poes]

Sheesh, not one of you has mentioned the summoning of Inglip!
http://www.urlesque.com/2011/01/17/i...nternet-humor/

Captcha's hit me often... I've tried using Web Visum but often I get a reply "the server could not solve the captcha" : (

related http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=548798

[Chronister]

You can get some real oddities in reCaptcha. Because one of the words is a computer-generated word, and one is scanned in from a (usually historic?) document and then jiggled about a bit, there isn't always a lot of quality control on the scanned word. I've often had accented letters or punctuation, occasionally mathematical symbols and even had the whole word upside-down once or twice!

That's very interesting. I did not know that's how reCaptcha creates its CAPTCHAs. I'm just wondering why more sites don't use number based CAPTCHAs. I don't mean that people should type numbers but rather solve a simple math problem to show that they are human. Is it because it would be easier for a spambot to break?

[samanime]

There are various reasons people use one captcha over another.

Half the time, the reason is just because it's the first one they came across or they've seen it advertised as "the best".

Math captchas are pretty easy to crack though (if they're plain text).

Like I've said before though, I don't like captchas at all. It'd rather get some spam that I have to deal with rather than chasing away legitimate traffic.

[Stomme poes]

I don't mean that people should type numbers but rather solve a simple math problem to show that they are human.

Cuz lots of us idjits can't do simple maths. Robots were built for two things: doing our chores for us, and doing math in their heads.

[Stevie D]

That's very interesting. I did not know that's how reCaptcha creates its CAPTCHAs.

The whole purpose behind reCaptcha, the reason why it became popular, was because it was supposedly doing something constructive - at the same time as it was fighting spam, it was also helping to decode and transcribe various scanned (historical?) documents. The theory was that if the same scanned text was flashed up on hundreds of different people's computers as part of a captcha and most of the typed in the same word, that was pretty certain to be correct, so they had now got the correct word to put in place of the scanned text.

[AirFor]

recaptcha is a joke - but not as big a joke as googles captcha lol

Did anyone else find this ironic?

[Chronister]

The whole purpose behind reCaptcha, the reason why it became popular, was because it was supposedly doing something constructive - at the same time as it was fighting spam, it was also helping to decode and transcribe various scanned (historical?) documents. The theory was that if the same scanned text was flashed up on hundreds of different people's computers as part of a captcha and most of the typed in the same word, that was pretty certain to be correct, so they had now got the correct word to put in place of the scanned text.

So what made Carnegie Mellon decide to not only attempt to stop spam but also decode documents? I'm guessing they wanted to get two things done at once, but what was the exact motivation behind it?

Did anyone else find this ironic?

Not at first until I thought about it for a few more seconds. I'll just you'll learn something new every day.

[samanime]

@Stevie D: Interesting, I didn't know that was the story behind it. That's kind of cool. Though I still think captchas are annoying. =p

@Chronister: Why not? =p Carnegie Mellon does a lot of research type projects (the Alice project is another one of their brain children, which is a simplified 3D programming program).

[brities]

Whatever happened to accessibility?

These things do nothing to help able bodied people never mind someone who might have a disability.

I can understand why they exist, the same reason we have to put locks on our doors, but I don't have to like them.

I also have never been able to understand an audio version.

regards

Brian

[adh32]

If refreshing a ReCAPTCHA is supposed to produce a more legible example, why does that very rarely work for me? And I cannot decipher the audio, either.

These dreadful things seem to be far more popular with web developers than they are with us oft-forgotten web users.