Are reCAPTCHA CAPTCHAs getting harder or is just me

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recaptcha

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+16 Q:

Are reCAPTCHA CAPTCHAs getting harder or is just me

As I have been testing sites, I have found reCAPTCHAs getting more and more difficult to read. Is it just me or are others having this problem too?

Along with this, I had a user this morning complain about receiving a Bristish Pound character in their reCAPTCHA. Of course the user didn't know what to do, even though I have message stating they can click the reload/refresh icon to get a new CAPTCHA.

Unfortunately, this implementation is on a site often used by people over 60 years of age, so more complicated or confusing CAPTCHAs are a problem, but the site still receives a lot of people attempting to produce spam.

+4 A:

I have a hard time reading most Captcha's, but I agree that reCAPTCHA's are a special nuisance.

Allyn 2009-01-30 18:08:33

I'm totally the opposite: I especially like reCAPTCHA's because they use real words and not just a random garble of letters and numbers. Personally I find that so much easier.

chaiguy 2009-04-06 13:33:27

+2 A:

I find reCAPTCHA's to be the absolute worst for usability. I often avoid sites that use them.

I don't mind that sites need to do these tests, but they don't need to be so near-impossible to figure out.

scunliffe 2009-01-30 18:16:05

You've managed to gain 2,500k rep on a site that uses them. :-) Very sparsely, though.

Tomalak 2009-01-30 18:42:30

hehe, yeah I know, but the quality of the rest of this site convinced me to overlook it (plus I think I've only seen it once) ;-)

scunliffe 2009-01-30 18:55:40

They're not that bad, come on. It usually gives you a few tries. ;)

chaiguy 2009-04-04 15:02:00

If I can't get it on the first try, then the process is flawed. The end user shouldn't have to struggle to complete it, only the hacker trying to decipher it programatically.

scunliffe 2009-04-04 20:55:06

Yes. It is getting harder. If everyone realized how reCAPTCHA works, everyone should pass even with an unreadable word. reCAPTCHA always shows 2 words: one of the words reCAPTCHA knows its ASCII representation through OCR, the another, you can fail, because reCAPTCHA doesn't know the correct answer. When I find a too difficult reCAPTCHA I simply type "verydifficultword" along with the readable word.

Jader Dias 2009-01-30 18:16:23

Does reCAPTCHA ever use your guess at the unreadable word in a future 'readable' word someone else's future reCAPTCHA? (Though it could work ok if it required multiple duplicate guesses)

Grant 2009-01-30 18:21:05

No, in my experience. The reCAPTCHA site (http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html) does not tell anything about it, but it can be implemented in the future.

Jader Dias 2009-01-30 18:30:50

The problem is then that in the display there is nothing that says... "hey" one of these words we don't even know... feel free to take a wild guess - we won't hold it against you. ;-)

scunliffe 2009-01-30 18:31:27

@scunliffe - that's kinda the point. They're trying to get people to OCR their text.

Eli 2009-01-30 18:40:59

That's very bad behaviour, because it makes it harder for reCaptcha to correctly read those texts. Against such behavior they show words to more than one user.

Georg 2009-01-30 19:14:20

@gs "very bad" but not worse than showing impossible to pass tests. they should filter those words. many words were originally readable but become unreadable with reCAPTCHA's strikes and distortions

Jader Dias 2009-01-30 19:24:37

It's actually pretty clever: they show an unknown text several times mixed in with known ones. Once a certain threshold of reliability is reached where several humans confirm the text, it is then used as a test word for others--each test contains at least one known test word.

chaiguy 2009-04-06 13:20:50

If a bunch of hoodlums gathered together and all entered "verydifficultword" for a word, then it might be a problem. I recommend at least guessing what it says, bearing in mind it should be at least part of a real word.

chaiguy 2009-04-06 13:23:39

+4 A:

John 2009-01-30 18:21:36

That's actually one of the easiest captcha's I've read. The ones on this StackOverflow are a lot worse IMO.

Paul Stovell 2009-01-30 20:27:07

I hate when you're absolutely sure you type the right thing and it tells you it's wrong!

chaiguy 2009-04-04 14:59:21

+1 A:

Perhaps reCAPTCHA, as it starts to run lower on words that people get correctly, starts paring harder and harder 'unknkown' words as people filter out all the easy ones?

Grant 2009-01-30 18:22:42

+3 A:

Ironic, because although computers are certainly getting smarter, people are probably getting dumber, too.

resurgens 2009-01-30 18:24:09

People aren't getting dumber. More dumb people now have access to the internet.

Grant 2009-01-30 18:29:03

I think the "average dumbness" always hovers a around the "too dumb to use" value. If you make big efforts so technology gets easier to use (smarter computers), "average dumbness" simply adapts and is at "too dumb to use" again. :-D

Tomalak 2009-01-30 18:33:18

People *are* getting dumber in the general case. We keep making everything "safer", which means that dumb people have a better chance of surviving long enough to reproduce. That brings the average down over time.

Brian Knoblauch 2009-01-30 18:33:56

Add to that the fact that dumb people tend to reproduce at higher rates, since smart people think ahead and realize , for example, "I can't afford to support more than 1 child."

gnovice 2009-01-30 18:37:01

@Brian Knoblauch: I am in favor of the Darwin awards, too. :-D

Tomalak 2009-01-30 18:37:07

Hey there's an idea: exclusive membership for intelligent people only, by having to answer some IQ question. :D

chaiguy 2009-04-04 15:01:09

To: all of you - related to comments - the movie Idiocracy really shows this is a worrysome manner.

ldigas 2010-08-23 16:13:36

+8 A:

Despite the opinions presented until now I actually like the reCAPTCHA system. I like it mostly because I consider that it manages to solve two problems at once: verifying human identity and help digitalizes writings (For those of you who don't know here is why it uses 2 words and not one : reCAPTCHA philosophy

So I encourage all of you to try passing the reCAPTCHA tests as often as you can because you are really helping a good cause.

AlexDrenea 2009-01-30 18:32:27

This is actually cool.

bigwoody 2009-01-30 20:24:52

I think they look the best too.

chaiguy 2009-04-04 15:00:07

+3 A:

The worst are the ones that are case sensitive. L, l, I, o O 0 ?

JC 2009-01-30 18:42:43

It's really hard to tell the difference between a lowercase x and an uppercase X that has been reduced in size randomly.

Grant 2009-01-30 18:59:49

+1 A:

reCAPTCHA will always get harder.

As they make tools to break reCAPTCHA, they will be using the same technology to help digitize text, therefore only the ones that the latest technology cannot read will be used as a CAPTCHA.

Its spy vs spy, except its a win win for reCAPTCHA and human knowledge.

The only problem they face is if they have a reader that is so good it never fails, reCAPTCHA will no longer work, but it would be a good problem to have for digitization of human knowledge.

Pyrolistical 2009-01-30 18:57:05

+2 A:

I think eventually CAPTCHA is going to stop being feasible and there's going to have to be some kind of universally recognized "passport" system for websites. Some kind of account that you pay a couple bucks for and it identifies you as a human when you sign up for a website.

Then, if you start using that account for your spam robots, you can get banned universally. Sites could even retroactively clean up posts based on those bans. shrug Just a thought

Kevin Laity 2009-01-30 19:03:59

An old idea of mine as well. I always said, there should be a fee for sending mails as well. Not big, something like 0,01Euro, but enough to turn away spammers. I would gladly pay 1E for every 100 send mails. Same thing with sites (although cleaning spam retroactively doesn't solve the problem)

ldigas 2009-04-04 02:22:46

I guess some what similar to OpenId.

Darryl Hein 2009-04-04 03:06:01

Problem with this is it's very big-brotherish. What do you do if your account gets hijacked? Are you banned from the internet forever?

chaiguy 2009-04-04 15:03:04

Now what you could do is have a universal captcha-verification that might need to be reverified once a year or something. Heck that would be simple enough to make an API for, maybe I'll do that. ;)

chaiguy 2009-04-04 15:04:44

1) If you're account gets hijacked, it would mean your credit card has been stolen, which is not 'our' problem from the perspecticve of this system. 2) Problem with what you're suggesting is that the spammer then just needs to have a human do a captcha whenever their universal id gets banned.

Kevin Laity 2009-04-04 15:27:38

Well correction, maybe it wouldn't mean that your CC got stolen but it would mean that you weren't being responsible with guarding your credentials, in which case, you have bigger problems that such a system would not be responsible for helping you with.

Kevin Laity 2009-04-04 15:30:49

And then someone hacks into it and the internets fall apart.

Brian Ortiz 2009-09-29 00:05:28

+2 A:

I think they are getting harder, I know I tend to fail every captcha I try at least once, sometimes twice. There are good alternatives emerging though. For example, Geoff Appleby shows nine photos and gives a text description for you to select three of them (scroll down to the comments form).

Such a system would be very accessible to the profiles you outlined (the photos could be quite big). Also a lot easier to implement.

Paul Stovell 2009-01-30 20:11:08

+1 A:

I've been identified as not-human several times by the Stack Overflow blog comment captcha. Now I just keep requesting new captchas until I get one I can read. Usually only takes ~3 tries.

Update: According to Ben Maurer, the Chief Engineer at reCAPTCHA, who commented on my blog about this, over 96% of reCAPTCHAs are solved correctly. So maybe we as a group are just getting dumber?

Bill the Lizard 2009-01-30 20:18:14

+1 A:

The thing to keep in mind about ReCAPTCHA is that they are images actually scanned from real books and articles. As such you have to be aware that funky punctuation and stuff can make it in--it's not just words. For example I've seen partial words that end in a hyphen (that obviously occurred on the end of a line) as well as dollar-signs, numbers (like 1. Something), etc.

I find if you bear in mind the origin it makes a heck of a lot more sense and is easier to solve.

Also interestingly, you only need to get one of the reCAPTCHA words right, because the other is used to aid in the digitization. However you won't know which is which. :)

chaiguy 2009-04-04 02:04:36

I just did 11 in a row at http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html. Some of them were a little tricky, but I didn't fail a single one. I don't know what you guys are complaining about.

chaiguy 2009-04-06 13:28:12

+1 A:

ldigas 2009-04-04 02:26:18

Actually it only looks hard, but if you actually realize it's just four black letters XORed together it's quite obviously RBG1.

chaiguy 2009-04-04 14:56:45

Of course. But it's still a PITA to read. For me, at least ... I always have to "concentrate" reading that.

ldigas 2009-04-04 15:51:16

Well I mean isn't that really the point? The reason they work is they tap into areas of the brain that computers aren't good at. Naturally it's going to involve at least some amount of thinking.

chaiguy 2009-04-06 13:30:26

Granted, you wouldn't want to do this every time you submit a post or something, but a little concentration once in a while isn't that bad. ;)

chaiguy 2009-04-06 13:31:30

@chaiguy1337 - 'tis true. But I prefer to concentrate on other things than captchas. They should just serve the purpose - identify humans from bots, nothing else. They are means, not ends.

ldigas 2009-04-06 17:46:43

Yes, it is getting harder. What ever may be the good thing it does, it should be usable. I tried 3 or 4 times on their audio captcha and failed each time. Though captchas try to solve a real issue, for those who can not see the captcha image and have to rely on audio captchas it is a big problem. Also not all the sites which uses captcha provides audio options. In any case, I think we'll have to keep proving to these machines that we are indeed humans for a long time to come.

Niran 2009-04-04 03:58:29

+1 A:

Quite a few downloading sites have just stopped using captchas. All you really need to do is log the IP address of the client and stop giving them access for x minutes.

Same thing can be used for passwords. Did the user mistype his password 3 times? Let them wait five minutes to try again. And give them the option to refresh it by sending them an e-mail.

About time we get rid of those captchas. Computers and algorithms have become fast enough to crack even the hardest ones. While only making it frustrating for people.

Carra 2009-04-04 15:04:36

+2 A:

Definitely getting harder now. My most recent one had something completely indistinguishable, next to 'are' written upside down.

Skilldrick 2010-08-23 15:56:18

ansaurus

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Are reCAPTCHA CAPTCHAs getting harder or is just me

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