Captcha

[HLG]

You folks are going to have to do something about your captcha because there was at least one letter that look like it could be an "a" that wasn't an "a" and nearly impossible for a human to read. After about the 10th try I was about ready to pack it in and move on. As soon as I finish with this message I'm going to return to my forum and disable it and go straight to questions and answers until I find a more workable solution. Otherwise I run the risk of alienating a fair number of potential members.

[Irisado]

Welcome to the forum.

It is annoying, but finding an alternative is problematic for reasons which have been discussed previously.  Take a look here for the most recent discussion prior to this one for further details.

It will go away after ten posts.

[kat]

All CAPTCHA's are crap. They're about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, too.

Hate 'em.

[Phphelp]

I agree, I have 24 inch monitor and I have a hard time making out the letters and I thought re-captcha was bad. Normally takes me like 3 tries to get it right and a few image flips to get it right.

[Arantor]

Well... they go away on this site at 10 posts.

I'd note that not ALL CAPTCHAs are terrible at being hard to read. Only most of them

[kat]

You'd think that SMF would use something a bit snazzy, instead of something so tediously boring and annoying, really, wouldn't you?

[Arantor]

SMF's CAPTCHA hasn't been touched in years.

I still think mine's pretty snazzy but I won't licence the code to SMF for various reasons.

[kat]

I've seen some pretty clever variations that seem a doddle to implement.

I assume, though I could be wrong, that there's the "Keep this place as near to 'out of the box' as we can" thing involved. Dunno.

The current system is a REAL turn-off, though, I believe.

[Arantor]

There's that, there's also the accessibility issue; most of the fancy ones ignore the whole 'catering to visually impaired users' thing entirely.

[kat]

I've seen an extremely good version of CRAPTCHA that should be dead easy to implement.

Instead of swirly letters that are indecipherable, you get presented with a couple of small grreyscale photos of letters/numbers/words, which are very clear.

Sure, that'll mean that you need quite a few pix of these things. But, the pix aren't terribly big and they take up very little room, at all, really.

I should think that'd be fart-easy to set up.

[Illori]

photos do not work for those that can not *see* them

[Arantor]

And it's totally bypassable with trivial effort... because there is a magic bullet that allows you to completely ignore it, it's called the audio version.

When ReCAPTCHA was first broken, it was done so by applying speech recognition to the audio CAPTCHA.

In SMF's case it's even easier, you already have a master set of exemplar sounds to compare against, and even though the result sound has distortion and noise, the comparison is not a difficult one to automate.

[kat]

I guess we're back to asking questions that bots don't know, then, aren't we?

Nope. That wouldn't be good, on a multi-language site, would it...?

How about pix of common objects, with a multiple-choice response?

A pic of a table, say, with options "Chair", "Television", "Bed" and "Armadillo"?

That could present language hassles, too,  guess...

[Illori]

and if you dont speak english how will you read and answer the question?

[Arantor]

Here's an idea, why doesn't someone add multi-language questions to the system?

[Illori]

somehow i doubt the devs have the time...

[Irisado]

Also, even if they did have the time, which is doubtful, how could we cover all the necessary languages for a forum such as this?

[Illori]

ask the translators to help out...

[Arantor]

Both major forks of SMF have done it...

As for covering all the languages, if you already have language moderators and translators, it seems to me it would not be a large task to ask them for the questions.

[kat]

and if you dont speak english how will you read and answer the question?

That could present language hassles, too,  guess...

I'm sure that items such as "Table", "Chair", &c. will be easy enough to translate...