August 11, 2012 | In: General
Captchas Are Getting Ridiculously Hard
OK – clearly this is not a post about the stock market or anything related to the stock market. In fact, this is not a post – it’s a rant. I visit a lot of websites on a daily basis and I post a comment if I like what I read (regardless of whether I’m in agreement with the author or not) – no, make that I try to post a comment if I like what I read.
The thing is many websites use captchas right now and these captchas are getting ridiculously hard – it sometimes take me 10 refreshes to find a one that I can actually read! I mean, if spam bots that decode captchas are getting better than us reading them then the whole concept of a captcha is flawed and should be substituted with something else. This spam prevention method no longer works – it’s becoming more annoying and it renders the commenting functionality barely usable.
Take a look these captchas and see if you can figure the letters on any of them (Note: I have generated these captchas in sequence – I haven’t selected the ones that are unreadable – I’ve just selected 5 captchas in sequence):
What I have noticed that most catpchas have at least one unreadable word – where you try to guess what the letters are.
I think we have reached the point of nonsense when it comes to spam protection – we don’t need this – there must be a better way to protect us from spammers while ensuring that the website’s usability is not affected.
In case you’re wondering who you should complain to for this captcha product (it’s called recaptcha), then it’s none else than Google – the Internet king. Good luck with that! I find it very weird that Google, despite all its efforts to make the web a better place, insists on keeping this product that should be flushed down you know here.
Perhaps I’m slowly, but surely becoming dyslexic – because I’m sure I was able to read these captcha words a few years ago – but now I can’t. I honesty can’t!
Oh, by the way, a response to the captcha people telling us to read books – we are reading, that’s why we’re trying to comment!
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