...Really now, Escapist? I am disappoint.

[drbarno]

As far as I know, I think the mods had opted for a "Better safe than sorry" approach with them, seeing as I had no idea about any bots appearing before the captcha's, which can be sometimes funny.

 

[tharglet]

I have never seen spam in my year on the escapist.

Lol, I've seen about 3 or 4. Granted, a lot less than other forums I'm part of, but they are around. (Been here less than a year)

 

[Delusibeta]

Off topic, but I've never seen an illegible reCaptcha. The other type that they're introducing ("Solvemedia") sounds like something that should die in a fire, frankly.

(Not that I've experienced either on this site. I seem to have gotten lucky with the captachas here.)

[EDIT]

Yep, this type of capcha should die in a fire.

 

[Trivun]

Captchas doubling as adverts? Huh? I haven't seen any of those. And I'm honestly not fussed by the captchas. If they're actually helping to keep spam down (bear in mind that of course we haven't seen much spam, because it usually gets deleted almost straight away, but takes up a lot of mod and staff time behind the scenes, which we don't see) then I'm all for it. I don't see why everyone is so annoyed over them, to be honest...

 

[Dexiro]

The captchas have nothing to do with making money. It's because the site was becoming a target for spambots.

These ones are annoying though, they're barely readable 90% of the time.

My last captcha was ToyotaCare, and it had a background of a car, and it had a picture of a hand with a key being dropped into it. Are you sure you want to make that claim?

Ah I'm just getting the regular Captchas, only just heard about the one's with ads D:

 

[Recron]

well so far I haven't run into an captcha thing yet but then again I don't post very often but I can see how it can be annoying.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Half of the users get the new ones. They're seeing if these one's are easier than the ReCaptcha ones by checking the fail rate. Join the Tech Team Usergroup, they tell you about these things.

I've noticed that reCaptcha tends to serve up non-text or totally incomprehensible text fairly often, so we're going to test a different captcha system on about half the users (called Solvemedia). This one can mix phrases, animated images, or ads into the captcha instead of the reCaptcha scanned text images - the ones that I've seen so far tend to be a lot easier to understand (the ad-based ones are in clear, plain text).

Some people will continue to see the reCaptcha units, and won't notice any change at all. I'm tracking how many failures each type generates so I can figure out which one actually causes the least number failures.

The Solvemedia tech is based on the same stuff as reCaptcha, so it has reload and audio options too, which most of the other third-party systems don't seem to"

This is the PM that the Tech Team group sent out to all members of the usergroup.