reCaptcha is the Worst

[Gangster_Octopus]

Yes, [url-“reCAPTCHA”]reCaptcha is the worst. It is worse than Britta! I understand the need for security and bot protection, but there has to be something anything better than this illegible piece of garbage. Christ, I have to refresh 10-15 times or more just to find something I think I can read and I usually do it with my fingers crossed because I am guessing on a couple of the symbols. Hmm is that a capital s, no wait is that is a …w, an n, the number 3? What the fuck, is that? It looks like a monkey playing a Wii. It might help if maybe they were actual words.

So fuck you reCaptcha and double Fuck you to those sites that use it.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

Þø33¶@__^ÆsØsmoid**

Please type what you see in this window before I reply to your post.

[nogravity]

I agree, recaptcha sucks more than anything. There’s quite a few alternatives out there so I don’t know why places insist on using it. Worse, if you’re on a phone. Also, you’re basically working for Google by translating OCR text into digital.

[Gangster_Octopus]

@Gangster_Octopus

Yes, [url-“reCAPTCHA”]reCaptcha is the worst. It is worse than Britta! I understand the need for security and bot protection, but there has to be something anything better than this illegible piece of garbage. Christ, I have to refresh 10-15 times or more just to find something I think I can read and I usually do it with my fingers crossed because I am guessing on a couple of the symbols. Hmm is that a capital s, no wait is that is a …w, an n, the number 3? What the fuck, is that? It looks like a monkey playing a Wii. It might help if maybe they were actual words.

So fuck you reCaptcha and double Fuck you to those sites that use it.

Fixed Link

reCaptcha

[3_20_59_or_bust]

Lately, their trick that’s been pissing me right off is cutting off the top or bottom half of a word.

Christ! The whole word ends up looking like “ooooooo”. How am I supposed to know if that’s a “p” or a “q” or a “d” or a “b” or a…

[LavenderBlue]

You really need a special pair of glasses to read a lot of them. Or a new pair of eyes. Amen to the OP!

[Andy_L]

@Gangster_Octopus

Yes, [url-“reCAPTCHA”]reCaptcha is the worst. It is worse than Britta! I understand the need for security and bot protection, but there has to be something anything better than this illegible piece of garbage. Christ, I have to refresh 10-15 times or more just to find something I think I can read and I usually do it with my fingers crossed because I am guessing on a couple of the symbols. Hmm is that a capital s, no wait is that is a …w, an n, the number 3? What the fuck, is that? It looks like a monkey playing a Wii. It might help if maybe they were actual words.

So fuck you reCaptcha and double Fuck you to those sites that use it.

Worse than Britta? But she’s awful!

[Mekhazzio]

@Gangster_Octopus

I usually do it with my fingers crossed because I am guessing on a couple of the symbols.

It’s almost like that’s what you’re supposed to do.

[billfish678]

@Mekhazzio

It’s almost like that’s what you’re supposed to do.

My theory is they are collecting all that random stuff and they will eventually compile it into Shakespears Works version 2.0 . A billion monkeys with typewriters and all that jazz.

Bastards probably won’t even give anybody residuals either.

[VinylTurnip]

Maybe it’s designed to detect rage.

[Enkel]

@nogravity

Also, you’re basically working for Google by translating OCR text into digital.

Um, if Google doesn’t know the correct answer in advance, then how can they tell if you got the challenge correct?

[Morgenstern]

@3_20_59_or_bust

Lately, their trick that’s been pissing me right off is cutting off the top or bottom half of a word.

Christ! The whole word ends up looking like “ooooooo”. How am I supposed to know if that’s a “p” or a “q” or a “d” or a “b” or a…

No kidding. They put the bottom 10% of one word and the top 10% of the other word. And they want you to guess it. I do my best to avoid sites that use it.

[Rubixcube]

I like reCAPTCHA far more than the alternatives, rather than hiding random nonsense under under layers of noise and colors and distortions they display actual words that are usually just a little fuzzy/squished but remain mostly readable. Plus they actually do something nice since they help to digitize old texts.

[Bosstone]

@Enkel

Um, if Google doesn’t know the correct answer in advance, then how can they tell if you got the challenge correct?

That’s why there’s two words. One is known and the other is not. You only have to get the known one right, while your answer for the unknown one is entered into their database and compared to all the other answers for that particular image. If the answers are too statistically divergent or there’s too many refusals to answer (shown by refreshing the captcha to get a new one instead of answering it) they’ll pull it for further study. But if 999 people out of 1000 say that an image reads ‘fartf’, they’ll take the crowd’s word for it.

[Morgenstern]

@Rubixcube

I like reCAPTCHA far more than the alternatives, rather than hiding random nonsense under under layers of noise and colors and distortions they display actual words that are usually just a little fuzzy/squished but remain mostly readable. Plus they actually do something nice since they help to digitize old texts.

That’s what they say, as well as the words are all words from old texts, but I’ve seen many that could not possibly have been words in any language.

[Alessan]

@Morgenstern

That’s what they say, as well as the words are all words from old texts, but I’ve seen many that could not possibly have been words in any language.

Maybe not in any *human *language.

[Cue theremin]

[Sattua]

I recently encountered it for the first time, and kept getting ones in which one word was literally a black rectangle. WTF?

[TheChileanBlob]

It’s fun to make comics from them though.

[DrDeth]

And, they ask you to type the word- and it’s not a WORD. It’s nonsense. They also mix in zeros and O’s in there, which are impossible to tell apart with widely differing fonts.

[nogravity]

@Enkel

Um, if Google doesn’t know the correct answer in advance, then how can they tell if you got the challenge correct?

Go and read what’s directly on their site

Some of the pertinent info:

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows…
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect…

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books.