Does anyone understand what this ‘CAPTCHA’ is saying?
Posted April 20, 2009 – 11:02 pm in: Interaction Design
‘CAPTCHA’ is an interface element, designed to distinguish between human and a computer programme. A typical ‘CAPTCHA’ will ask the user to type in a word displayed in a distorted form. While I completely understand the fight against SPAM, some of these ‘CAPTCHAS’ are even getting difficult for humans to decipher. Trying to create a new account for Gmail will present you with a middle-heavyweight ‘CAPTCHA’ challenge which you can see in this post’s photo.
Tags: captha, challenge, gmail
3 Comments
Unfortunately it is a necessary evil I think.
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart…or CAPTCHA (sorry not captha – unless one has a lisp
)
I myself have been bitten at my forum (little known, rarely seen) at theuncoded.com/forum. It was constantly getting blasted by bots making user accounts (around 900 at one point before I noticed – yes sad). They posted hundreds of posts of porn.
I used SMF and I wanted to look for something like this to thwart the majority.
The examples here are indeed hard. I’ve been on sites where I’ve gotten it wrong or simply had to request again and again until I got one I could make out.
I think I heard something about 3D CAPTCHA’s…
Hi David,
I agree that CAPTCHA is needed but there should be an easy way for human to read it…
Sometimes you can do it elegantly, by asking a question. For example: what is the 3rd letter in cats?
‘Rapidshare’ has a notorious CAPTHA…
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/552/259k5eqol8.png
Problem with asking a question is that I think it’s easy for a program to be written to understand. I can ask Google how many litres are in a gallon and it will tell me. It’s a fine line with this stuff and I’m not sure where you draw it.