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Please change your captcha system

Started by escrowms, May 24, 2013, 12:55:12 PM

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Arantor

I would note that I am working on multi-language Q&A for 2.1, I've just hit a roadblock with making a decent interface for it ;)
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Kindred

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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

kat

I wonder if just using numerical figures would do the job?

I realise that they're not, perhaps, 100% language-neutral. But, they'd be more-so than words and fingz, innit?

Arantor

No, it wouldn't.

Two problems. Firstly, bots are smart enough to solve that easily enough. The less smart ones will just throw the question at Google and see what happens. (And Google Calculator will give the answer readily enough)

Secondly, you'd be surprised how people have trouble with this. One forum I know used to have a question of "5 - 8 = ?" and the number of people who didn't realise the answer was -3 and were insistent that the answer was 3 was actually surprising (and sad)
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kat

I meant just displaying numbers, such as "6789 3856".

The reason I wondered, is that some of the download sites, such as ZippyShare and PutLocker seem to use numbers, now.

Those numbers aren't text, though. They're photographs of numbers.

Maybe, something like...

???

Kindred

but what if it's a russian keyboard that doesn't have latin letters?

And, I would assume that some systems (chinese?) use other than arabic numerals....
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

kat

Maybe what was said about "Language-specifics" could be employed?

You'd need way fewer files, for this, than you would for words, shirley?

(I'm just kinda throwing things around, really). ;)

As I said, I've seen this kinda thing on some sites and it's SOOOO much better than the usual stuff. :)

Kindred

actually, I think that the concept of supporting questions in multiple languages is the best idea...   we know that questions work - we just need to make them work for sites which support more than a single langage

I don't think that image matching is really the way to go, since that would then exclude the visually impaired/blind...
(and, if you have some sort of audio answer, then the spam processors can parse it)

Questions can be read by screen readers, but, if properly phrased, are not answerable by bots.
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Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Arantor

Well, that's what reCAPTCHA is doing at the moment, it's offering up an 8-9 digit number with deformation (which it knows) and the house number from a photo from Street View (which it is presumably using for the purposes of identifying numbers, since it knows where the picture was taken and it's using it as crowd sourced geotagging)

But some of those are not a lot better than the CAPTCHA we already have.
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kat

I suspect people have been working on all sorts of ideas, for ages, now.

Pity the bastards that design the bots seem quite clever, innit? :P

Arantor

Cleverness is only one half of the argument. The other is the small factor that it's possible to buy CAPTCHA solving services that will get human solvers to solve 1000 CAPTCHAs for the region of $1. Since most systems are hard-shell only, once you have an account, it's effectively free to spam.

But do note that there are some clever folks on the good side of the fence too ;)
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kat

Ah, yeah. I'd forgotten about the "humans"...

Bugger. :P

mashby

Quote from: Kindred on September 30, 2013, 03:39:21 PM
but what if it's a russian keyboard that doesn't have latin letters?

And, I would assume that some systems (chinese?) use other than arabic numerals....
Russian keyboard
Chinese keyboard

And actually, this is likely used by the Russians and the Chinese (and us as well).
Always be a little kinder than necessary.
- James M. Barrie

Arantor

There are plenty of layouts that don't conform to QWERTY (Dvorak and AZERTY are the more well known ones) but that's not really the problem here ;)
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Akyhne

Those images are impossible to read. Using letter reading instead.

But since all kinds of captchas with letters are broken, why not do something different? 

Arantor

You mean like the Q&A that's been in 2.0 for years and is improved with multi-language support in 2.1?
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Akyhne


Arantor

Which is good then that I already added additional measures into SMF 2.1 then, isn't it?
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Akyhne


Arantor

I'd rather not. It's a well known fact that spam bots examine the source and attempt to beat our defences, the more attention I call to them, the quicker they're going to defeat them.
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