7 ms·

CAPTCHAs are overused because of groupthink and fashions/fads. Before you use a CAPTCHA of any kind, consider very carefully if you really need one. I've seen

• smeagull 3y ago
  Spam is ever present, and Captchas protect from the massive torrent of trash.
• Zardoz84 3y ago
  i had to put a CAPTCHA system on a public register form for digital libraries, because they were getting spammed by bots.
• efields 3y ago
  We ignored them until we needed them. Then we needed them.
• danuker 3y ago
  > no one will ever conceivably even try to automate/script the thing being designed. Spammers will spam everywhere they can. My minuscule personal site suffers from it very rarely, but I can imagine anyone getting a lot of page views making it worth it.
  • yonixw 3y ago
    On my custom built site I have none of those. But, on my WordPress site, I had to install captcha the second days. Spammers are just using scripts, which cost next to nothing...
    • eli 3y ago
      If a site gets even a little popular it attracts spam and security scanners and other nonsense no matter how it's built.
• heipei 3y ago
  I don't know. I run a SaaS that allows free user signup and significantly more than 50% of my daily signups are just signup "spam", without any visible motivation for doing so. The user name or information doesn't show up anywhere publicly and there is no inherent value in having a free user account. I've implemented some basic countermeasures (dummy form fields which reject the submission) which wasn't enough. I've added reCaptcha, and I'm still getting 50% spam signups from working (!) gmail addresses, meaning someone is able to receive emails on these. The majority of these are from places like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc. I don't event want to know what my site would look like without my own countermeasures + reCaptcha + if it was a service where a user account has any kind of "value"...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • daveoc64 3y ago
    Is there a particular problem if someone signs up for an account on your system and doesn't use it? Is such an account using a lot of resources?
    • SiempreViernes 3y ago
      Well, you can't use raw signup numbers as a tracker of how well you are doing?
    • philote 3y ago
      Blocking others from signing up or using the username they'd prefer. For example, the bad actor could spam the registration with valid email addresses and depending on how your system handles registration it could either send validation emails to those addresses or block the person that owns the address from signing up.
    • heipei 3y ago
      It doesn't use up too many resources, but I still don't like having more than 50% of the user database be essentially spam. If you ever want to sell your company you want to have somewhat accurate numbers of actual user registrations. Ever since I realised the extent of the issue I have become very doubtful about reported user counts from startups. In our case the only reason we've realised this is spam is because we annotate signups with GeoIP and also allow users to fill in a name and title which will then be something like "find escorts in Chennai" and the signup will be from India etc. If you only look at the email addresses all you'll see are many gmail addresses with western names, so you might be fooled into thinking that all of these are legitimate users.
• janpieterz 3y ago
  Thought the same, had a pleasant signup form for a small SaaS platform nobody really knows about, with no captcha. Then someone or some group found it and there's been a barrage of attacks varying in intensity, vectors etc. Cost us so much money in vendor costs the small company is now in danger of going bankrupt. I appreciate the sentiment, as I had it, but rest assured any future publicly accessible form I build will get at least a CAPTCHA in front of it.
  • newaccount74 3y ago
    I have a bunch of publicly accessible forms and none of them have captchas. I did once run into an issue where a signup form was abused by a spammer, but that was a simple fix (tip: in verification emails, do not include any information that the user typed in the form). If you are careful with your forms, you don't need captchas. Captchas add a lot of friction for some users, so if they can be avoided, they should be.
    • throwawaymobule 3y ago
      can you explain what you mean by that tip? was this spammer using your verification emails to send spam or something? or was it more complicated, like not needing to store which fake account had which details?
      • newaccount74 3y ago
        The registration form had a name and an email, and I sent a message similar to the following: Hi <name>, thank you for signing up... The spammers put their spam message in the name field, so my server started sending messages like this: Hi Get free cialis now http://example.com http://example.com, thank you for signing up...
    • mpalmer 3y ago
      Many captchas add friction for some users, but some types don't; there are relatively fast "proof of work" captchas that aren't surfaced to the user at all.
• vincnetas 3y ago
  CAPTCHA on registration page removed quite a bit of automated registrations. What are other options to prevent/reduce automated registrations? (one from top of my head email/phone verifications)
  • realusername 3y ago
    hidden fields will remove most of the non targeted attacks. And if they really are targeted, I don't think CAPTCHA will help much.
    • revicon 3y ago
      Google reCAPTCHA v3 has worked pretty well for us, we saw many instances in our logs where v2 was solved by scammers on our site using some automated tools that had a 25% success rate (plenty for automated scammer scripts) but upgrading to v3 stopped all the automated attacks. So far we haven’t seen successful solves of v3 in the wild and we’re a payments company so we see a lot of attempts.
• chollida1 3y ago
  Life as a developer has taught me to take the other side of your argument. I'd disagree on this. Once you release something to the wild you need to have robust controls in place to prevent one person or group of people from using all your resources. I wouldn't release a product that doesn't have rate limiting of some kind, of which a captcha is one way to rate limit. Always trust people to push the boundaries of your app as far as they possibly can. I have yet to build a system where someone doesn't. And that includes tools I've built for inhouse users:( Whether intentionally or not, they always find a way to push the boundaries:)
• V__ 3y ago
  This is in line with my experience as well. For most sites, CAPTCHAs are overkill and an accessibility problem. Hidden honeypot, maybe a simple “How much is 5 + 2” keeps 99% of spam out. I had a few more difficult cases, which were solved by blocking some geographic IP regions and adding blacklists for certain words, like “crypto” for example.
  • revicon 3y ago
    Remember that Google reCAPTCHA v3 is invisible to the user. No accessibility issues.
    • Nullabillity 3y ago
      It's invisible until it isn't.
      • revicon 3y ago
        Hows that?
  • frodowtf 3y ago
    I'm not an expert on honeypot inputs but wouldn't it be super easy to check for type=hidden or opacity=0 if you'd like to spam?
    • V__ 3y ago
      Yes, but most bots don't. There are also some more elaborate methods. Giving the input a tabindex="-1", aria-hidden="true" and then moving it left: -100vh works pretty well.
• a_c 3y ago
  It took me one incidence to turn from "no one will ever conceivably even try to..." to "everyone will nod their heads and move on"
• giancarlostoro 3y ago
  We use Auth0 which determines when to show a captcha, I think "Smarter Captcha" should be the industry standard. If you don't suspect the end-user being a bad actor, why show them a captcha every time. In fact, Google's Captcha is awful for literally almost always showing it, tells you they dont care about stopping bots, only the data they get from user inputs. Edit: And come to think of it, A TON of websites do "smarter captcha" or whatever you want to call it, because in one of my computer I enabled the resist fingerprinting setting on Firefox, and I get a captcha every visit on some sites that NEVER show a captcha (I think it might be cloudflare driven, but unsure). Like Walmart comes to mind, it shows me a pill looking thing where I have to hold the mouse click until it fills.
• lapser 3y ago
  A long time ago, I was still in college (UK college, i.e., pre-university), and still learning. I discovered a classmate was involved in some event, and found the event's website. They didn't have a captcha. By your logic, this was the right choice. In reality, my dumb ass decided it would be fun to script something that would register millions of users (another classmate ran the script with me). After a few hundred thousand registration, the website was brought to its knees. I was a bit shook, but didn't think much of it. Next morning I come into class, and was reprimanded by my teacher. Turns out, the owner of said event had threatened to sue the school and me, among other things. What had happened was their servers were down, their email server was brought to its knees, their web servers had died, and generally I had caused a lot of damage without even thinking about it. It caused them to potentially lose some money. None of this was my intention, of course, but I didn't know much better. Point is, kids will kid, and spammers will spam. There are plenty of bots that just scrape the internet and fill out forms indiscriminately. Captcha may or may not be the best option here (I'm always of the opinion it's not, especially not reCAPTCHA), but something has to be put in place, even if to stop the majority of bad actors.
  • asddubs 3y ago
    you can also just limit the amount of sign ups from one IP each day. There's more simple heuristics to prevent unsophisticated abuse like that
    • hansvm 3y ago
      > limit the amount of sign ups from one IP each day one per library per day...
      • wongarsu 3y ago
        one per coworking space, one per office location for each company
    • distcs 3y ago
      > you can also just limit the amount of sign ups from one IP each day This is a classic example of how "just do this" kind of thinking can lead to terrible results. Do you now see how "just limiting the sign ups from one IP each day" can go very very wrong?
• staringback 3y ago
  Years ago I had a blood test taken at a local pathology place, the form they were submitting had a CAPTCHA and pictures they were given weren't easy by any means. I'm talking the kind of stuff you get trying to go to google.com on Tor browser. As far as I could tell this was an internal form that wasn't publicly accessible
• Pxtl 3y ago
  If you writing your own account registration form instead of using something off-the-shelf that provides captcha service for you, or even better are just using an oAuth or similar technology so users don't have to manage yet-another-password? I already hate you.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  > In reality, in most of those cases, no one will ever conceivably even try to automate/script the thing being designed. There are more than enough people running automated crawlers, probably fed from Google "inurl: contact-form" searches or whatever, and just blanket spam you.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]