Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

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Discuss features as they are added to the new version. Give us your feedback. Don't post bug reports, feature requests, support questions or suggestions here. Feature requests are closed.
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agent00shoe

Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by agent00shoe »

Highway of Life wrote: Agentshoe,
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate your enthusiasm.
And of course, I'm all for persuing an alternative method to the CAPTCHA since it's very simple how that works.
If a bot can read it, a human can read it.
If a bot can't read it, a human can't read it.

But it does discourage bot registrations, so it is a must have, of course...

Have you considered one that does a CAPTCHA like picture... it would choose from a selection of pictures... say, animals or birds, for example.
Then the user would type in the name of the animal, and if they don't recognize the animal, can click a button that loads a new image/animal.
I don't know how feasable this would be, but it might be an idea to work off of.

Yeah, I've seen images come up in discussion, but that opens up the possibility for even more wrong answers than these. For example, a picture of a bird shows. Someone might type "small bird", "blue bird" etc. There's no definitive answer. The script I linked has room for multiple, acceptable answers so it cuts down on the margin of error.

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EXreaction
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Re: Captchas and Human Readability

Post by EXreaction »

agent00shoe wrote: Since captcha is about human interaction, what do you think about trying a simpler, more human approach and steering away from competing with bots and OCR, like this?


That wouldn't help at all on the majority of boards.

First of all, if they are all preset the bot writers will simply have the bot find out what it says, and fill in the right thing.

And if board owners configure questions/answers you know most boards will never let you register. People will write stupid questions, and make the answers so that they are more than 1 word long(which would make it nearly impossible for anyone to register).

Not to mention any spelling errors, capitialization or anything weird about the answer.

Even if you would set it so that board owners configure it, 75% of people that own them won't change a thing.

agent00shoe

Re: Captchas and Human Readability

Post by agent00shoe »

EXreaction wrote: That wouldn't help at all on the majority of boards.

First of all, if they are all preset the bot writers will simply have the bot find out what it says, and fill in the right thing.

This defeats the purpose of having bots in the first place. If someone is willing to do the work, they might as well register accounts manually.
EXreaction wrote: And if board owners configure questions/answers you know most boards will never let you register. People will write stupid questions, and make the answers so that they are more than 1 word long(which would make it nearly impossible for anyone to register).

Not to mention any spelling errors, capitialization or anything weird about the answer.

I'm not sure why you think people will go out of their way to make it difficult for others to register. The new captchas can be set to make it more difficult, too, so it's moot. If people choose to make the questions hard, that's their problem. It's meant to be simple and if they don't keep it simple, oh well. It's case insensitive btw.
EXreaction wrote: Even if you would set it so that board owners configure it, 75% of people that own them won't change a thing.

Changing questions every now and then is just a simple form of maintenance. Board administrators deal more tedious tasks than this. If you have enough questions queued up, I don't even think it's necessary to ever change them.

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Highway of Life
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Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by Highway of Life »

Well, I'm not so sure...

1) Lets say you had a collection of animals such as Giraff, Elephant, Moose, Deer, Rhino, etc... there are literally hundreds of possibilities. Without getting them mixed up.
I can see where Birds would be a problem. :)

2) Out of 10 Questions on your script, I got 8 Correct.
Image

agent00shoe

Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by agent00shoe »

Highway of Life wrote: 2) Out of 10 Questions on your script, I got 8 Correct.

It's just a sample to show a variety of questions. If I implement it on a board, they'll be REALLY easy questions. 80% is probably better than the number of people who get captchas right on the first try. ;)

One advantage to using the current captchas is that they're unique each time. But I think between each forum using their own set of validation questions and sooo many forums out there, the variations of questions would be endless. Even if a bot stayed on a single forum, trying to crack the answers, the different possibilities are about the same as it guessing captchas, and they don't even need to guess right now because they can read captchas. Show me a bot that can think for itself and I'll scrap this.

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Highway of Life
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Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by Highway of Life »

You have a point. :|

I guess I would just like to see how it would be integrated into the registration page, and how well it would work with it... and most of all... I would like to see feedback from normal (non-admin) users between your system, and the CAPTCHA.
Image

agent00shoe

Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by agent00shoe »

I'd probably have it where the captcha is now and say something like, "Please give the correct response to this statement to prove you're a person and not a robot from outer space" or something silly like that.

I realize it's not perfect, but what is perfect? The current cycle of captchas becoming harder to read while OCR improves can't go on much longer. I have a blind friend who uses text to speech to use the internet and email and this would integrate with that so much better than the current images, too.

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Eelke
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Re: Captchas and Human Readability

Post by Eelke »

Could we not start a discussion about this here as well? There's already a healthy discussion going on here. Cheers.

NeoThermic
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Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by NeoThermic »

Just a small point, asking math questions isn't a good idea. A lazy bot writer doesn't have to parse much bar a google result page:

http://www.google.com/search?q=What%27s ... nus%201%3F" target="_blank


With a bit of programming, I'm very sure most of the questions you've put in as samples could be googled by a bot.

Secondly, the system suffers the flaw that is constant in all situations: the forum admin.
If the code ships without stock questions, few admins are going to take the time to add questions/answers to the system. If the code ships with some default questions, many admins will just use those, and since plain text on a page can be parsed as plain text, it won't take more than 30 seconds of programming to wirte a bot to read and lookup the answer.

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Re: Captchas and Human Readability - Discussion

Post by Yawnster »

Agent00shoe you seem to think that administrators are smart people, that always care about security, I am sure that NeoThermic can vouch that this is never going to be the case. Admins will only care about security usually until its too late, and the attack has happened..

What about forum systems that cater for lots of different languages? Say a forum has 10 forums, each devoted to a language.. which one do you choose as the start language? And how many questions do you have to translate?

Your idea is good, but its not really viable for this situation as simply languages have too many variables to work in this way.. In opinion..

Yawnster

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