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General discussion

Those Stupid Captchas

Feb 9, 2011 10:00AM PST

Is it really necessary for those captcha letters and numbers to be so twisted and warped that half the time you get them wrong, because that 7 was really a 1, or maybe an upside down L? ***!!? Since they're graphics anyway, is it necessary to warp them at all? There has to be a better way. I think whoever designs them is just F'in with us because their job is designing F'in captchas.

Discussion is locked

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Yes!
Feb 9, 2011 1:07PM PST

It has many uses such as preventing standard automated software from filling out a form with some assurance that a human is at the keyboard.

The most vehement haters of captcha tend to be those that want to perform click fraud or worse.

I fear that the alternative is to take such forms and services off line.
Bob

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Really? Is that the Best system possible?
Feb 10, 2011 3:43AM PST

Can Automated Bots actually read the digits on the captchas if they aren't warped? I thought they were flat graphics. Do the spambots scan the graphics and decipher the digits?

Is it really necessary to make the captchas so hard to decipher? I'm fairly literate (got honors at multiple schools) but half the time my captchas get rejected and I never can understand how I might have made a mistake. Maybe the whole system's just flaky but as you argue, it's the BEST today's techheads can do.

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If you can do better.
Feb 10, 2011 3:49AM PST

This is one of those areas where the choices are to use that or go offline.

Then again we have that brilliant person who wanted to automate the captcha decoding and here's what they did.

The robot scraped the web page and then on another pron site asks for the person to decode the captcha to see the pron. The human inputs the decoded captcha and gets their pron and the robot uses that to do the dirty deed.

I think they are thinking "Humans are such easy prey."
Bob

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OK, I thank you
Feb 10, 2011 6:32AM PST

Thanks. I'm happy you cleared it up for me. As long as scumbag scammers and spammers are with us, I guess the captchas are a necessary evil.

Someday we may live in a world without spammers, trashy local business flyers on our doorknobs (most of which don't even service our neighborhoods), and scammy phone callers who ignore the Do Not Call lists (apparently with impunity). But I doubt if I'll still be alive to see that day.