Dear Escapist Magazine: Captcha This

[Pebkio]

Really, your captchas are getting unreadable. I have to refresh several times now to find something I can actually read. There are a few, simple things you can do to make it a tad easier for actual humans to use:

1: Do not use "n"s or "m"s. Especially next to each other. Within your bendy text, they can blend together with other letters, making things look like "r"s. Or can turn "in" into "m".

2: Don't use either the "i"s or the "l"s. I don't know if you noticed this, but the text can really get fragmented, and suddenly you don't know if you're looking at an "l" with a bit of it missing, or an "i" with an extra blot.

3: Never use "r"s. They have always, ALWAYS, formed with other lettes. For instance, a part of the captcha below says either "sirIn", "sinn" or "siHn". Maybe it's just that spot of invertedness that's making this harder to read, but still, it could be any of those.

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Of course, post if any of you has a suggestion I missed (or just want to tell me I'm wrong or something). I'll probably add good suggestions to the list up here.

 

[Bernzz]

How about all the captchas containing powers, or letters in a completely different alphabet? Or just plain symbols? It wasn't this bad for me at the start, but it's certainly gotten worse.

 

[manaman]

How about all the captchas containing powers, or letters in a completely different alphabet? Or just plain symbols? It wasn't this bad for me at the start, but it's certainly gotten worse.

Only one word is a test, the other word the system is trying to figure out.

It's usually pretty obvious which is which. Last captcha I got had a couple of lines of text, centered between the lines making neither readable. I mashed the keyboard and it accepted it.

 

[Bernzz]

How about all the captchas containing powers, or letters in a completely different alphabet? Or just plain symbols? It wasn't this bad for me at the start, but it's certainly gotten worse.

Only one word is a test, the other word the system is trying to figure out.

It's usually pretty obvious which is which. Last captcha I got had a couple of lines of text, centered between the lines making neither readable. I mashed the keyboard and it accepted it.

If only you could use that method for every captcha, eh?

I'd like to think that I've proved by now that I'm human, though. And furthermore, we had that plague of spambots a little while back. What actual use are the captchas if that can still happen?

 

[manaman]

How about all the captchas containing powers, or letters in a completely different alphabet? Or just plain symbols? It wasn't this bad for me at the start, but it's certainly gotten worse.

Only one word is a test, the other word the system is trying to figure out.

It's usually pretty obvious which is which. Last captcha I got had a couple of lines of text, centered between the lines making neither readable. I mashed the keyboard and it accepted it.

If only you could use that method for every captcha, eh?

I'd like to think that I've proved by now that I'm human, though. And furthermore, we had that plague of spambots a little while back. What actual use are the captchas if that can still happen?

Yes you might see spam, but that is only because they are going for a good compromise between stopping bots and allowing users to post with only minor inconvenience. Next time you see spam imagine how much more you would be seeing if there where no captchas.

As for proving you are human, well that is a continual thing. There is nothing stopping a person from setting up an account, adding a few posts, then spaming except for the fact that captchas continue.

Also you can use that method for every captcha. Like I said only one of the two words is a test. It's obvious which one is the test, so you can enter whatever you like for the second word. Since the goal of having you enter text for the other word is analyzing scans of older text and improving the success of scanning older texts for archival purposes is fairly noble why not just put your best effort into it.

 

[Pebkio]

I'd like to think that I've proved by now that I'm human, though. And furthermore, we had that plague of spambots a little while back. What actual use are the captchas if that can still happen?

Actually, yeah... there was this game I played: Mabinogi. It was plagued by bots, hundreds of them, in all the grinding areas for new players. They came up with an in-game item called the Captcha Bomb. Use it on a player you suspect is a bot, and if they fail, locked out for 30 minutes. The bots were beating them within a week...

 

[Pebkio]

Holy crap! I just saw the symbol for Delta. The mathematical symbol for "delta". How in the cunting hell am I supposed to type that?

 

[CrystalShadow]

Holy crap! I just saw the symbol for Delta. The mathematical symbol for "delta". How in the cunting hell am I supposed to type that?

That's messed up. Though I'm sure if you really wanted to type it you could use Character map... It's kind of the whole reason it exists.

 

[Joel Dawson]

Holy crap! I just saw the symbol for Delta. The mathematical symbol for "delta". How in the cunting hell am I supposed to type that?

Read this

Only one word is a test, the other word the system is trying to figure out.

It's usually pretty obvious which is which. Last captcha I got had a couple of lines of text, centered between the lines making neither readable. I mashed the keyboard and it accepted it.

 

[Creator002]

I don't mind the captcha. Sometimes they're funny and I don't get many foreign language symbles. I refreshed mine now about 15 times and only got â and é (and then my captcha vanished ).
If the captcha REALLY bugs you, you can get Publisher's Club and it gets rid of it, as well as the ads on the site.

 

[Pebkio]

Read this

Only one word is a test, the other word the system is trying to figure out.

It's usually pretty obvious which is which. Last captcha I got had a couple of lines of text, centered between the lines making neither readable. I mashed the keyboard and it accepted it.

Yeah, I had read that, and though "OH! Okay, I can't wait to try that out. So then a fucking Delta sign showed up. Seeing as I could read the other one, I just entered that and replaced Delta with D.

Guess what! Thppppppppppppppppppppptand then I had to re-enter another captcha...

Off-Topic Edit: I actually like ads on some sites. I've found new webcomics I've not seen before, learned about upcoming games, and have even seen your mum.

 

[Esotera]

xD you realise that the whole point of captchas is that they don't know what the individual letters in the words are, so it's pretty hard to pick out & exclude m and n, etc. I haven't had any difficulty with them, apart from the greek character ones, which there's a convenient refresh button for. I almost enjoy them.

 

[ACman]

I think they can be pretty funny. Are they computer generated or something because sometimes the come out in herbrew, cyrilic or greek alpabets or sometimes mathematical expressions. Thinking about starting up an imgdaddy site devoted to it.

 

[Pebkio]

I think they can be pretty funny. Are they computer generated or something because sometimes the come out in herbrew, cyrilic or greek alpabets or sometimes mathematical expressions. Thinking about starting up an imgdaddy site devoted to it.

Heh, bend that up enough, which they usually do, and "ain" could turn into "cim".

xD you realise that the whole point of captchas is that they don't know what the individual letters in the words are, so it's pretty hard to pick out & exclude m and n, etc. I haven't had any difficulty with them, apart from the greek character ones, which there's a convenient refresh button for. I almost enjoy them.

So, the point is not to differentiate between humans and machines? It's actually meant to see how lucky of a guesser you are? Or to keep track of how many times you push the refresh button?

 

[TimeLord]

If you have an issue with the technical side of the site, please contact the Tech Team User Group [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Tech-Team]. Where they should be able to answer your questions directly.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Holy crap! I just saw the symbol for Delta. The mathematical symbol for "delta". How in the cunting hell am I supposed to type that?

Shift-Gamma. Unless it's a lower case Delta, in which case, Ctrl-Gamma.

 

[Derek_the_Dodo]

I think they can be pretty funny. Are they computer generated or something because sometimes the come out in herbrew, cyrilic or greek alpabets or sometimes mathematical expressions. Thinking about starting up an imgdaddy site devoted to it.

Heh, bend that up enough, which they usually do, and "ain" could turn into "cim".

xD you realise that the whole point of captchas is that they don't know what the individual letters in the words are, so it's pretty hard to pick out & exclude m and n, etc. I haven't had any difficulty with them, apart from the greek character ones, which there's a convenient refresh button for. I almost enjoy them.

So, the point is not to differentiate between humans and machines? It's actually meant to see how lucky of a guesser you are? Or to keep track of how many times you push the refresh button?

No, the captcha has two purposes. One is to stop spam on the escapist for example by typing the test words that you see in the image, thats why it's here. The second is to use you as a free slave to translate what the computer cannot into digital text from a source, usually scanned pretty badly.

What you do if you come across a word with mathematical symbols, numbers, or any punctuation, foreign language, or upsidedown text, or strange font is type whatever the hell you want for that word. it's not the test word, the other word is, usually recognisable by font and a black blob in the middle.

so if you get pissed off with the crap they try and get you to translate just type whatever the hell you want instead. mash the keyboard, write "fuck off captcha", whatever, it doesn't matter, all that matters is that you type the single test word properly.

TL;DR read it and youll find that you'll save time every single time you have to write a stupid captcha that you cant read as opposed to hitting refresh.