Stupid captchas

somefeen

Some of these things are absolutely stupid.
I was trying to register on another website just now and the captcha wants me to "arrange the icons vertically" and there's sliders underneath random pictures that rotate them.
I have fecking turned them every which way and its still wrong.
What does arrange vertically even mean anyway? Surely "arrange the icons upside down" would have been a bit easier to interpret.
what a load of bollocks. Can't even make out some of the pictures aswell since their so tiny or of something I've never seen before in all my life.

Then there's the ones with the stupid letters and numbers. Is it a 2 or a z.

Another site asked me a very specific question, what was the name of blah blah blah, who blah blah blah'd the blah blah.

Did a google search, got what I thought was the guys name typed it in and it was still wrong. Turns out he had some kind of mad middle name as well.

Why can't we all just use those ones where it shows you two words from a book?

srsly78

Are you a robot?

FatherLen

somefeen wrote: »

I was trying to register on another website

porn...

antodeco

Erm, are you sure you werent on a games website? Was there any "captchas" that asked you to put numbers into rows? If so, you were playing Sudoku

Dravokivich

Can't stand the things. I immediately lose interest in sites if I can't read what's on'em. That goes for decrypting these bastards of the internet.

asherbassad

What the hell are you on about?

kfallon

Thought the OP was dyslexic and was on about Stupid Catchphrases

Overthrow

The black and white captchas that have the blurry words in them are actually scans from real books. By solving the captchas you're helping to digitise the books. So, knowing that you're actually contributing to something worthwhile actually makes the process a bit more tolerable.

FatherLen

Overthrow wrote: »

The black and white captchas that have the blurry words in them are actually scans from real books. By solving the captchas you're helping to digitise the books. So, knowing that you're actually contributing to something worthwhile actually makes the process a bit more tolerable.

i fell asleep twice trying to read this comment.

Stark

We should all use xkcd style captchas: http://xkcd.com/810/

brimal

Overthrow wrote: »

The black and white captchas that have the blurry words in them are actually scans from real books. By solving the captchas you're helping to digitise the books. So, knowing that you're actually contributing to something worthwhile actually makes the process a bit more tolerable.

I was about to post something similar. Annoying as they are, you are actually participating in a global program to digitize the world's books. Each captcha is actually a snapshot of two words from a book that isn't digitized yet. More accuracy is achieved by getting humans to do it instead of software.

AFAIK the only captcha system that does this is Google's reCAPTCHA - it's used by a lot of companies

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Where To

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Kidchameleon

My site was getting so bloody spammed lately that I considered captcha technology. But its sh*te so I went for a honeypot instead.

DavyD_83

brimal wrote: »

I was about to post something similar. Annoying as they are, you are actually participating in a global program to digitize the world's books. Each captcha is actually a snapshot of two words from a book that isn't digitized yet. More accuracy is achieved by getting humans to do it instead of software.

AFAIK the only captcha system that does this is Google's reCAPTCHA - it's used by a lot of companies

Hang on, surely this would only be of benefit, if there wasn't already a value in the system for the characters you're interpreting.

In which case there would be no 'correct' answer on the system.

I call shenanigans, this makes no sense.

brimal

DavyD_83 wrote: »

Hang on, surely this would only be of benefit, if there wasn't already a value in the system for the characters you're interpreting.

In which case there would be no 'correct' answer on the system.

I call shenanigans, this makes no sense.

The system doesn't automatically assume one person's input is correct. It offers the same two words to many different people randomly, and then once it reaches a certain amount of matching answers, it assumes this is the correct input for the two words.

Custardpi

brimal wrote: »

The system doesn't automatically assume one person's input is correct. It offers the same two words to many different people randomly, and then once it reaches a certain amount of matching answers, it assumes this is the correct input for the two words.

That's fair enough for when it has reached its threshold of matching answers, but in the first few goes it has no reference point to say what's correct, so if they're using a particular captchka of this kind for the first time how do they decide whether to let the user past or not?

brimal

Custardpi wrote: »

That's fair enough for when it has reached its threshold of matching answers, but in the first few goes it has no reference point to say what's correct, so if they're using a particular captchka of this kind for the first time how do they decide whether to let the user past or not?

One of the words is a 'control word' which is known by the system. If the user enters the control word correctly, they let the user through regardless if the other word is correct or not. They then use this other word several other times without the control word, and it goes on and on.

Control words are previously digitized words that have been inputted by a very large amount of humans, thus giving it an even higher accuracy.