New CAPTCHA

[Lieutenant Clone]

What I'm saying is, give some of us the option to not have a super-unreadable CAPTCHA, give us at least one good option.

(and enable it by default)

[DavidMJ]

Highway of Life: Noise does nothing if the CAPTCHA sucks. Certain second order derivatives can just nuke it out.

Lieutenant Clone: Look up the definition of CAPTCHA.

[Highway of Life]

I'll save you the trouble. It's a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

MJ, the problem is, it sucks now. If it's not human readable, what's the point?

uranusalien: Yes, it looks better, and readable without noise, but you should be able to read it WITH noise.
Also, even without noise, as elmar put it: "get your parents to read it", trust me, if your parents, or grand-parents can't read it, it should be improved.
Just look at all the people in this thread complaining about it. And we are the Admins who will have to deal with it on a daily basis from Users who can't read.

This is what they look like with Medium noise (there are three options of noise, light, medium, and heavy)

[DavidMJ]

MJ, the problem is, it sucks now. If it's not human readable, what's the point?

I beg to differ. Due to the nature of my job and that field that I work in, I am able to ask a non trivial amount of people to solve the default CAPTCHA with its default settings. They seemed able to do so. You fail to do this in your post. Also, I refuse to make any kind of change based on the whim or personal account of a single person. Two people are not much better.

[Xore]

I tried adding a little bit of a hint to Occlude. What do people think?



Edit: basically, a little zigzag to indicate the order in which the letters are supposed to appear.

I could also change the code to allow the letters to read left-to-right, top, followed by left-to-right, bottom, and then have the code draw the appropriate zigzag depending on which method it chooses (current, or top-then-bottom)

[Highway of Life]

MJ, with respect, would you like me to start on page one and go through to this page (16) and quote all the users who are complaining about the difficulty of the CAPTCHA?
I'm not the only one. But don't take my word for it, read all sixteen pages.

[DavidMJ]

MJ, with respect, would you like me to start on page one and go through to this page (16) and quote all the users who are complaining about the difficulty of the CAPTCHA?
I'm not the only one. But don't take my word for it, read all sixteen pages.

I _refuse_ to waste any more of my time and energy on this paticular discussion. If you wish to continue, I would be more than happy to ban you. As to the sixteen pages, _very_ few have been devoted (a.k.a. none) to problems with the current system. Most have been about new methods or improving existing ones.

[Xore]

MJ, with respect, would you like me to start on page one and go through to this page (16) and quote all the users who are complaining about the difficulty of the CAPTCHA?
I'm not the only one. But don't take my word for it, read all sixteen pages.

The purpose of any given captcha is to make it difficult for a computer to read, while still maintaining human readability. But if you approach the problem from human readability first, then you're always going to end up with *beep* captchas. Very easy to read, sure, but very easy for a computer to read also. The adversary's toolkit comes with filters, blurring, resizing, color differentiation, rotations & any number of transforms, pixel cuts, image derivatives & edge detection, clustering, segmentation, etc, (and many other tools), followed by OCR. Any adversary who's serious about breaking in will have this toolkit or someone on pay who does.

The approach you NEED to take with an effective captcha is

• First of all, how do i get something onto the image that a computer will crap itself trying to decode, that will cause problems with any & all of the above items in the adversary's toolkit.
• then how do i make it easier for humans to read without making it easier for computers to read

If you want to focus on human readability to the exclusion of making it difficult for the computer to read, then you might as well not even enable captcha in the first place.

Aside: It's also kind of funny what some people in this thread think will or won't confuse a computer.

[Highway of Life]

MJ, my apologies, that was an unwarranted statement on my part.
I felt it was uncalled for to say that you should change it based on my opinion, or that I was the only nay-sayer.
But my opinion is just that, (as I posted in my first post... it is only my opinion)
You don't have to change any of the four that are there, all I'm asking, is for one more readable option... I like Entropy the best, but I think it should be spread out just a tad so the letters don't run together. etc...

Apologies if my previous statement was offensive.

[elmar]

OK... this is getting stupid instead of valuable posts regarding phpBB3 improvement - its becoming the usual flame.
David you are obviously putting a lot of hard work into this - and it's very much appreciated.
But i think you looking into this whole issue too much from a programmers point of view, trying to create CAPTCHAs that will be almost impossible to read by bots. I think you have to try and look at it from a business perspective as well - that is what is suitable for the average internet user signing up to a phpBB3 forum. In the end it's all about this average user - he is the one that clicks on adsense, he is the one that back sites financially - thus his usability should be most valuable. He should be able to sign up with ease.