By Romain Sunday, January 18 2009 - 19:38 UTC - Stuffs - Permalink
Some time ago, I was amazed by the difficulty of a CAPTCHA implemented by rapidshare. Well, today I came across one which is even worse. We all know that using a CAPTCHA is very bad on a usability point of view, but without them, spammers would easily add junk in your database. But it's even worse when the CAPTCHA software is not working properly...
Sure you won't get any spammers here... nor regular users.
Just to avoid confusion or misinterpretation, even if you refresh/clear cache/etc. you will get this message. And no, 'ERROR' is not the solution of the CAPTCHA. Hope that phishtank will fix that soon...
We see many different CAPTCHA on the web, some are good, some not. I do not know why people keep developing their own simplistic CAPTCHA when there is a good services line the one provided by reCAPTCHA. This CAPTCHA is pretty solid and also adds audio version (way better for accessibility).
Comments
@Romain:
This is the best CAPTCHA ever :)
Seriously though, there are some very, very bad ones (TicketMaster is horrible!) that are barely readable by humans, and are starting to impact readability and usability. I think that the "other side" has gotten so good breaking CAPTCHAs (OCR, etc) that the CAPTCHAs that are out there now are trending towards a human not being able to read 'em.
So now what??
Yep,, I ran into one on Dev Shed, and despite there being NO doubt, what the desired response was, and having tried 20 times to see how many times it would tell me an obviously correct answer was wrong.
It also had an audio challenge for folks with visual problems that was even more of a joke. I was supposed to type in the words in an almost totally unintelligible audio clip but the track plays two slurred sentences from two different individuals with about 14 words total. None can understand the words. This Captcha could have a contest of a million dollars for anyone who manages to log in and they would still have that million a million dollars would only buy a hamburger at the local greasy spoon!
Yeah I get those sometimes and I do not like it, they make it so hard to comment on blogs nowadays because of spam that it is almost not worth it, and then when that CAPTCHA fails it make sme even more mad argggg.
a good piece of information about Captcha, while i prefer to use the captcha add-ons rather to create my own