I always had trouble with the old Captcha. The fonts were so darn fuzzy and I always seems to guess wrong on one of the letters. A lot of web sites will lock you out after a few failed Captcha tries.
The new method is so much easier. A 4 piece jig saw puzzle to assemble. So simple and I always get it right on the first try.
See, they can build a better mousetrap. 
I haven’t come across this type of captcha yet, but pretty much all the captchas I’ve seen I hate with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
I like the animated ones, where the letters are moving. Easier to read.
Anybody have some links to examples of sites that use those? I’d like to see some.
One of my bank sites does it this way: You have a eight-character password that only changes when you change it. When you try to log in, it asks you, e.g.,
“Enter the second, fourth, and seventh characters of your password.”
(IIRC, you have another regular password you have to enter besides this one.) This doesn’t do anything to improve password security (I don’t think), but it seems intended to keep bots out.
you can see the jig saw puzzle captcha (and solve it) without filling out the registration form. The captcha is required anytime I post on that forum. Thank goodness its easy to work.
That’s cute. I see that it allows some “slop” too in the positioning of the pieces.
What’s the point of that? Is it just to give you something to amuse yourself with in the middle of filling out a form? Because that’s sure as heck not going to stop any bots.
It seems to be based on this paper. What do you propose makes it easy for bots to solve. And not just any bots, but current bots?
That’s from 2010. A lot has changed since then. Spammers use APIs to work with humans now.
Image recognition software has also gotten to the point where that’d be easy even without human help (even more so since they show you an image of what it’s supposed to look like completed). If it’s working right now, it’s just because no spammer has bothered to try to break it yet.