To the person who came up with this idea, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. Fuck you and your fucking little picture that I am supposed to type in the letters. Yeah you make it so that computers can’t recognize the letters, WELL GUESS WHAT I CAN’T EITHER. So take your little image verification, and your website and shove it up your ass.
Don’t you hate it when you fail a Turing test?
Au contraire - form spam sucks so so so much worse.
15-love!
Brilliant! 
Captcha if you can!
its honestly not that hard to get it right. every now and then i will mess up thinking a q is an o or something but if that means less spam quit bitching
“I still fail CAPTCHAs often enough to be pretty sure I’m a robot.” - Merlin Mann
I was on a site recently (I think it might’ve been the Steam forums) and the CAPTCHA was so horrible that I literally couldn’t read 50% of the letters on most of the images. I was beginning to wonder if I spontaneously became colorblind.
I absolutely hate it. You’re shit out of luck if you can’t read crack type font. The best name I have had for it is Crack Type Font. Now if we can get somebody to provided the font for download, we can all send emails to those sites, using all Crack Type Font.
I did have a worse time trying to read those damn Coke Reward codes. It took me up to ten retries to enter one valid code.
There was a recent article on CodingHorror about how the most incomprehensible also tend to suck at what they do. Apparently there are underground software solutions that will decipher 50% of TicketMaster captchas. My only experience with TicketMaster is that the one time I tried to use it I gave up on the Captcha they gave me and decided not to go to the concert. (It was something along the lines of this )
Some captchas are more or less screwed up than others, but speaking as someone who sees the registration data on a large site with no captcha, they’re a good thing. Really. I’m begging my Engineering team for one.
Would you rather have the captcha when you sign up somewhere new or mountains of spam on every site and in your email? Or to not be able to register for the site at all, because your mail provider has blackholed them for spamming?
I think groman’s TicketMaster captcha included secret letters of the alphabet that only the NSA knows about.
Same here. I have difficulty telling between the “N” and the “M”, and also between the "“V” and the “W”, and it helps to know that they never use the letter “O”, just the numeral “0”.
I wonder if CAPTCHA is on the way out. I read somewhere that spammers set up a porn site which only let you in if you solved the test. The test however was taken straight from Yahoo e-mail signup so whenever someone logged in to the porn site the spammers got a new e-mail account. The same system could be used for forum spamming etc.
Hey, howcum gazpacho gets two lines of praise for saying
, and I got nothing when I said the same thing two weeks ago?:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=447637&highlight=Turing
It’s there for your protection.
(Where’ve I heard that before?)
Until I had a head injury, the image verification thingies weren’t a problem for me. Since then: oi. For my added security pleasure, my bank has added one every time I log in so I can only log in if someone is home to help. I know I need to contact them as they should have a handicapped option, but haven’t gotten around to it. There are a few jokes among my friends that I’m part Borg, so I’m enjoying the “are you a machine” jokes here.
The one groman linked to is best described as “super wac”. Maybe one needs certain prescription drugs to be able to see the pretty letters.
This has been going since CAPTCHAs started. There are further controls you can put on them such as timers to defeat the workarounds, but the Spam artists will find new workarounds. But CAPTCHAs work for 99% of the spammers, so they’ll stay.
re: the image. You have to view it through your Ultraman decoder glasses. Didn’t you get yours? You’ll need to order them through a Captcha secured link.
The only ones that really bother me are the ones where they screy with font size and distortion and then use letters that are the same for upper and lower case… Zz. Ss. Cc.
One thing I have noticed is that some sites now have an option to “read” the characters to you, not that it’s a widespread practice yet, but some of the better vendors are offering it.