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...

[Arantor]

You know, I should really just play my 'expert' card at this point

I have written my own CAPTCHA. As far as I know at this time it has not been broken by bots. It is specifically designed to resist conventional OCR techniques without being overly unreadable.

I have also written multi-language Q&A.

Due to the situation in which both were written, neither can be just dropped into SMF but could be adapted fairly quickly.

Neither is a particularly hard task if you're competent and know SMF - the former took a couple of weeks of research and development, the latter took... no more than two days and probably less than one in the end.

[Irisado]

ask the translators to help out...

There aren't active translators for all languages though.

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.

If there were more active translators, then this would be an option, but that's not the case at the moment.

[Arantor]

If there aren't active translators for all languages, presumably the userbase from those languages is small enough that it wouldn't actually matter not to have those languages supported.

[kat]

I have written my own CAPTCHA.

Curiosity duly peaked...

Oh, come on! With the words that I'm suggesting, even Bing translate would be good enough, Shirley?

[Illori]

if it is easy enough you can use a bot to translate it, it is too easy to use.

[Irisado]

If there aren't active translators for all languages, presumably the userbase from those languages is small enough that it wouldn't actually matter not to have those languages supported.

Not necessarily, no, although in some cases that would be correct.

[kat]

Are we talking about the same thing, 'chele? I'm still on the pix and asking what the image is a pic of...

[Arantor]

K@ - check out Wedge's registration. Or the registration on Bryan's site, I left him a copy of it way back.

Ultimately if there is any text in a CAPTCHA challenge, it will be an issue for language speakers because the text has to be translated. Putting it in images doesn't necessarily help anything.

Irisado: True enough. But I'm operating on the principle that while it's a compromise, to me it's a better compromise than the current situation and if it were actually a problem, I'm sure some of the people from those languages would be able to help perform translations...

[Illori]

Are we talking about the same thing, 'chele? I'm still on the pix and asking what the image is a pic of...

the image description is still going to be very basic... basic means easy for bots to crack

you give choices and someone will find the answer even if just by guessing

[kat]

Bryan's is screwed, Pete.

The "D" could've been an "O". I request another image and keep getting the same one.

Certainly better than the standard one, though.

Bots can discern images, can they? Coo.

[Arantor]

Firstly, O should never come up in SMF CAPTCHAs (mine included). It specifically excludes some letters where there is ambiguity in the letter forms.

Secondly, getting the same image is a symptom of browser caching, not the CAPTCHA itself; the odds of you getting the same image are very very tiny - it doesn't just generate one type of CAPTCHA, it generates several visually distinct styles.

Thirdly, in the much better version I have, it doesn't use SMF's fonts at all, so the ambiguity aspect is less of a problem

And yes, bots are getting to the stage where they can discern images. Reading text out of images is years old as a practice, discerning images when you have a set of exemplars to work with is no problem.

[kat]

I did look more like a "D", to be honest.

I MUCH prefer that to "normal" CRAPTCHAs, I have to agree.

[Kindred]

Arantor...

I think we all agree that support for multi-language questions (and potentially multi-answer questions) are probably the best option.

Obviously, it's not done for 2.1 -- but inclusion for 2.2 or 3.0 (whichever is next on the schedule) is something that should be considered.
I recall having this conversation between you, me and MrPhil already and I though we had actually come up with an outline that would not be difficult to implement.

[Arantor]

That's the point... both Wedge and Elkarte already have it!

[Kindred]

I actually can not get registered on Elkarte, at all...

[The other Phil]

I concur that the captcha's are terrible. I don't think I'll make it to ten. This is probably my last post. If your goal was to keep away new participants, you've succeeded.

[Arantor]

The goal is not to keep new participants away but to try (in vain) to keep the spammers at bay.