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CRAPCHA: Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement
- pbreit 13y agoAll joking aside, is there any hope that the extremely user-hostile CAPTCHA will go away any time soon? Half the time I see it I wonder if it's really necessary. The other half I wonder if the service provider could be a bit more clever or industrious.
- kalleboo 13y ago> I wonder if the service provider could be a bit more clever or industrious That takes time and effort, something which is often in short supply. Easier to just slap any old captcha on there, even a mostly ineffective one will stop the drive-by scripts. I had to implement a non-CAPTCHA method of stopping spammer signups to our forums, and after a day of work I had something that still let through 2-3 spammers a day. A CAPTCHA would have taken under an hour (plugins available) and probably have stopped more.
- eloisant 13y agoThe problem of the captcha is not the efficiency, it's that it 's a horrible user experience.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoAnd the "best" user experience is to never require signup or login or credit card verification or anything.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoMore what? Real visitors of spammers? /s
- chewxy 13y agoA few days ago I had to pass a in a row in order to google for something. I failed 9 in a row, and on the 10th, it was finally readable. It totally wasn't the most pleasant experience.
- wladimir 13y agoThese recaptcha CAPTCHAs are becoming ever worse. I've seen many people struggle with them and even ask my help to decode them (because, hey, a computer person probably knows how to decode the code). That can't be the purpose? If you're using such a captcha, you're losing legit users, not spammers. Spammers are the more persistent, likely.
- cpncrunch 13y agoI don't know if that is true...I haven't noticed any particularly bad captchas recently myself, but I was constantly getting really incomprehensible ones about 6-12 months ago. I think perhaps the developers have realised that it was getting too silly and they've toned them down a little bit.
- dsymonds 13y agoIf spammers and service abusers went away, CAPTCHAs would go away. Service providers don't use CAPTCHAs for the giggles. And the bad guys are getting better with OCR (or using sweat shops) so CAPTCHAs need to get harder to read to keep enough of them out. If you can come up with something else that can distinguish legitimate users and bad guys, you'd be a very popular guy.
- WA 13y agoSome service providers seem to do it, because everyone else does it. Tiny blogs, obscure niche sites. They are afraid of spammers and never had a real look at it how necessary CAPTCHAs really are. Oftentimes, a simple JavaScript-based spam protection is enough.
- alagappanr 13y agoSo true! Its beyond ridiculous when you are forced to enter captchas on tiny sites which hardly get 10 visitors in a day. Have seen this in numerous such sites. Pure evil!
- panacea 13y ago"Pure evil!" Literally hyperbole.
- methodin 13y agoYou might be surprised the amount of spam a site with no real visitors can get by exposing a form.
- PeterisP 13y agoDo you think that tiny sites get less automated spammers? In such sites the spambot registration attempts far outnumber the real users. If you have a decent site, you can afford to review/delete/block spam afterwards, but if you have a small site and don't babysit it every dey, then a tough captcha is an absolute requirement.
- 13y ago
- epsylon 13y agoThe worse for me is when I correctly fill in the captcha, but incorrectly filled in another field, and I have to solve that damned captcha again. I can't think of a good reason why you would not remember that the user did correctly solve the captcha and not present it again.
- GhotiFish 13y agomoot, founder of 4chan has made it very clear in the past "No, we will never implement a captcha." It wasn't until the social virus was released on 4chan that uploaded itself, along with any random file it happens to find in Documents or other sensitive areas publicly, that the captchas were put in place. This evolved to the point where they started selling 4chan as a service without a captcha (I'm actually all for that). Sometimes there is just no way around the problem.
- gizmo686 13y agoYes, I think it is inevitable that they will go away. I am litterally at a point where it is easier to copy the image to my computer, and run a captcha breaking program, then it is to actually solve the captcha myself. Sure, the computer does not get it 100% of the time, but it gets it more often then me, and fails faster.
- twiceaday 13y agoChrome 26.0.1410.65 for OSX when I mouse over the text in the crapcha I get the I-cursor.
- diminoten 13y agoThe best part about bug reports for hostile features is the workaround is always, "Because fuck you, that's why!"
- richforrester 13y agoRightclick and inspect, copy paste the text into the captcha. That would have been the "workaround".
- claudius 13y agoSame with Opera (the decent one, not the webkitified version), simply copy-paste the text :)
- hfsktr 13y agoMy favorite part was the (i) link went to a new tab with the site. Captcha remind me of inkblot tests [1]. I wonder if there are any that actually use those cards. My favorite captcha experience: it only checked the first 3 characters matched (as in only enter the first 3 of a two word captcha). I supposed maybe I misunderstand how they work but I would have thought they checked against at least one full word. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test
- ultimoo 13y agoNice! If only I had known about this before April fools!
- ghayes 13y agoFor fun: a quick way to grab the crapchas on the page (that aren't protected by cross-origin) $('.crapcha').each(function() { console.log(['Crapcha', $.map($(this).find('span'), function(letter) { return $(letter).text(); }).join('') ]); });
- np422 13y agoMost captchas look like that to me. I frequently have to click reload half a dozen times or more before I find one that I'm able to decode. I think there is an opportunity for user experience improvement when it comes to stopping bots.
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoOld stuff being repost: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=crapcha https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=crapcha
- laurent123456 13y agoI wonder how the same link can be posted three times. I though HN was checking if the URL had already been posted before allowing it?
- jrochkind1 13y agoIt does. http://crapcha.com/ http://crapcha.com/ http://mashable.com/2013/04/17/crapcha/ http://mashable.com/2013/04/17/crapcha/ http://www.crapcha.com/ http://www.crapcha.com/ http://thomaspark.me/2013/04/crapcha-completely-ridiculous-and-phony-captcha-that-hassles-for-amusement/ http://thomaspark.me/2013/04/crapcha-completely-ridiculous-a... Except there does seem to be one old duplicate of the exact `http://crapcha.com/` http://crapcha.com/` one. Perhaps it allows a re-post after enough time has elapsed.
- Retric 13y agoNone of those got enough upvotes to make it off the new page.
- prodections 13y agoprodention
- OGinparadise 13y agoNot much to say other than LOL, maybe because it isn't that far off from the supposedly real and readable ones. Maybe put this at the last step of something the person really wants?
- elliottcarlson 13y agoNow it just needs a modem connecting sound as the audio mode.
- Auguste 13y agoI don't get it. This looks exactly the same as the other CAPTCHAs I see every day.
- meric 13y agoThe letters aren't images, they're span elements.
- SagelyGuru 13y agoAhh, so that is why we need all those unicode characters. Did you know that you can register domain names like these now? So very useful....
- apapli 13y agoI wasn't going to click on this but my intrigue got the better of my time. I am so glad I clicked through, this put a big smile on my face.
- bdowney 13y agoLooks almost as annoying a Google's reCAPTCHA.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoEvil Idea: Put up a really good, well paid, job ad with an application that has this crapcha at the very end. Log IPs and see how long the average person tries to submit their application. Compile and release the statistics to your evil deed on HN.
- uulbiy 13y agoIt might actually work quite well. "Can you beat the crapcha? You are hired!"
- nagisa 13y agoI could solve some of them quite well with only using a standard US keyboard and US layout (the trick is to use the compose key)… As long as they don't start including icons into the crapcha as well.
- lessnonymous 13y agoThis is missing the most important feature: a webcam shot of the person's face when they see it.
- mistercow 13y agoYou can solve this, of course, by using the inspector in Chrome to select the '<div class="code">', and then entering copy($0.innerText) in the console. So this is actually easier to solve than the audio mode of reCAPTCHA.
- julius 13y agoThanks. I did not know about the $0 trick :)
- glitchdout 13y agoI think you'll like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI
- julius 13y agoI like it. Thanks.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- maeon3 13y agoIn 50 years, the machine will be able to outperform the bottom 50% of the human population in any conceivable endeavor or task behind a keyboard/monitor. So CAPTCHAS will eventually be useless. So it's an intelligence race. The more intelligent system (a computer, human, or hybrid) will be able to deceive the lesser intelligent system (computer, human or hybrid). So the problem changes from: "Is the entity I am dealing with a computer or a human" to: "Does the entity I am dealing with have intentions to gain an unfair advantage over this transaction." Humans have a part of our brain where we look for how others might be taking advantage of us, the algorithms and data structures there are remarkable. Computers will need to acquire those abilities if they are to manage the exchange of money, goods and services.
- mikeash 13y agoCaptchas are really just an efficiency measure. You could simply have a human screen every single comment (or signup or whatever) and cull the spam. But human time is too limited, so we come up with lesser measures. When machine intelligence advances that far, we'll be able to easily automate human-level examination of every single comment or submission or whatever. So I think the problem will get better, not worse, with that level of power.
- entropy_ 13y agoAt that point, you'll have this: http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/
- seles 13y agoI solved one correctly, it didn't do anything special. http://crapcha.com/show/#eaShnaILW1 http://crapcha.com/show/#eaShnaILW1
- hung 13y agoShould've used 'ə'
- asciimo 13y agoI think they're really easy. For example: http://crapcha.com/show/#0rPMqgcbmt http://crapcha.com/show/#0rPMqgcbmt
- watsonc73 13y agoRyaniar (a budget travel airline in Europe) have started using this type of thing to their advantage. Each Captcha is about flight insurance, low cost, on time etc. Annoying and good advertising at the same time.
- bfung 13y agoI just spent way too much time on this. Some of the icons (the ones you can't view source and copy) come from http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/ http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/. Allow hex input and you're golden.