Topic: Capcha is useless?

[Unruler]

Bots could be programmed to recognize any capcha so it's only effective if you change it periodically.

However if you rely on security question for your forum, it's much more effective options since it's custom for every forum and could be changed at no time.

So question is why to use capcha at all? It's only additional inconvenience for users and it doesn't stop bots efficiently enough as it does security question.

[Kindred]

Are you talking about *THIS* forum?   If so, then the reason we can not use questions is because the questions are not able to be localized/translated... and we support users in 30+ languages here...

[Unruler]

Are you talking about *THIS* forum?   If so, then the reason we can not use questions is because the questions are not able to be localized/translated... and we support users in 30+ languages here...

Nah, I'm talking in general. My idea is if forum has security question there is no point in capcha because the first is more effective than the last.

[Kindred]

ah, well, you might notice that this has been discussed several hundred times already...

[Antechinus]

Nah, I'm talking in general. My idea is if forum has security question there is no point in capcha because the first is more effective than the last.

Yes, if you aren't worried about supporting a pile of languages you can do it that way. I don't use captcha myself. However, you will still need to be vigilant and to use IP bans, etc to keep the number of spammers down. No one solution is perfect.

[Unruler]

Hmmm, how about different question for different languages, is that possible?

[IchBin™]

Nope. You'd have to have a way to determine what language someone is using on their computer, then have SMF call the questions in their language for them. That's not something I have seen anyone do yet.

[MrPhil]

osCommerce attempts to do that, but I don't think it's consistently successful. It queries the browser for what language it's configured in, and selects that as the default store language to use (if installed/configured, otherwise fall back to a designated language, and finally English). Apparently a lot of people just leave their browsers configured in English.

[Matthew K.]

It wouldn't be too difficult to throw together some solution that would change the language of the verification. Problem is, the forum administrators would have to have the strings translated, correctly.

[Unruler]

I think select language dialog before registration could help.

Otherwise there are many ways to determine users' language, some sites do that via IP.

[mashby]

Captcha seems to be broken in that it prevents humans from doing things that automated bots do with ease. Isn't that the exact opposite of its original purpose? Questions are certainly an issue for multi-lingual sites. I think my response here might be robotic in that it's been written before. Back to captcha and the topic title. I think captcha is more harmful than useless. I've registered on one site that had me put together a six piece puzzle with an image of what I was supposed to build. I imagine even that could eventually be broken by bots. It certainly seemed language agnostic. I'm not sure a blind person would be able to complete it though. But it seemed like a step in the right direction.

[Matthew K.]

Slightly off topic, but for a chat software I was developing with a friend, we made a drag and drop "matching" game that was very simple to figure out and complete. If the user was not able to drag (iOS / Android, etc.) it would add number boxes to match the numbers.

[Antechinus]

Those sorts of things are bad for a11y, so you can't really use them if you want to cater to everyone.

[mashby]

Don't ya think we aren't really catering to anyone with the setup we have now? We sure spend time pruning spam messages which is what captcha was supposed to prevent. Time lost. We will never get that back.

[Antechinus]

Oh sure, I'm not saying anyone should keep captcha. I reckon it has been obsolete for several years, which is why I disabled it some time back. All it does is annoy legitimate users.

What I'm saying is that visual puzzles are bad for a11y.

[Matthew K.]

a11y?

[Antechinus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_accessibility

"Accessibility is often abbreviated a11y, where the number 11 refers to the number of letters omitted. This parallels the abbreviations of internationalization and localization as i18n and l10n respectively."

[Unruler]

I don't think that puzzles is better than capcha because you can program bot to do any automatized action (including solving puzzles). They are effective now because they are not wide spread.

The advantage of question is that it can be easily customized making bots hard to adapt.

PS Never heard of abbreviations with number of committed letters in them, they should be hard to figure out.

[kat]

What about a selection of pictures? You could display the picture and ask is this a:

House? Tree? Penguin? etc.

You could even make the pix quite intricate, as long as it's obvious as to what it's actually a picture of.

[MrPhil]

K@, anything that is purely visible would be a problem for the visually impaired that use a screen reader. Does anyone know if an audio description ("This is a picture of a cat. Please type in what it is a picture of.") works for the visually impaired, but stops bots? Maybe the two could be combined in some way: "This is a picture of a cat. Please type in the animal that is their mortal enemy."