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Campaign To Kill CAPTCHA Kicks Off
Bismillah writes "CAPTCHA may be popular with webmasters and others running different sites, but it's a source of annoyance to blind and partially sighted people — and dyslexic people and older ones — who often end up being locked out of important websites as they can't read wonky, obfuscated letters any more than spambots can. A campaign in Australia has started to rid sites of CAPTCHA to improve accessibility for everyone."
If the campaign was taken over by bots?
Yeah, but we value what blind people have to say. "Damn near the entire human race" can go fuck themselves.
If taking a couple seconds to answer a CAPTCHA is too much effort, I probably don't really care what you have to say in the comment section.
Or a couple of minutes considering most capchas are illegible.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Add some fields which start out as regular text fields but then hide them with Javascript. You can give them labels or default values like "Don't change this" in case someone doesn't have Javascript enabled. Give the real fields in your form random names. For the hidden fields, give them names like "subject" or "comments" or "url" (don't use common names for personal info like "email", "fname" etc that the browser might automatically fill out). When they submit the form, check for values in those hidden fields (either any value at all, or a value different than the default). If they are filled out, reject the form. Hiding the fields with Javascript will work for virtually everyone and it doesn't require real people to do anything extra. This will fail against bots that bother to actually render the page or bots that specifically target your site (which can be remedied if you randomize all field names and store the random names in the session to match them up when the form gets submitted), but those are far less common than bots that just get the HTML and parse it to look for form actions and field names.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I was about to tell you to take advantage of the audio alternative offered by many services, then I went and tried a reCAPTCHA audio test to make sure I knew what I was talking about.
I apologise for even considering telling you to use those.
If taking a couple seconds to answer a CAPTCHA is too much effort, I probably don't really care what you have to say in the comment section.
Or a couple of minutes considering most capchas are illegible.
This!
More and more, captchas take two or three attempts.
(Disclaimer: IMHO, I'm not senile, dyslexic, a horrible typist. blind. Your opinion may vary).
I suspect some sites are intentionally forcing a fail once or twice, at least occasionally, especially when you enter the word
in a timely interval. Bots probably give up after two failures, and they probably answer quickly.
So implementers make it more and more restrictive and throw in bogus failures.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I've been developing websites over 10 years and have never needed a captcha system.
This is how I always go about it:
1) Include a form input element labelled as something common, like a telephone number but on a registration form that would never actually require a telephone number. Hide the parent div using CSS in an external CSS file. When the form is submit, check to see if the element is filled out. If it is, simply display a message that you think their registration may be automated and to try again. If it continues, please contact us by other means (phone, email, etc) and we will help them through it.
2) Time the registration from the time the page is loaded to the time it is submit, if its less than 10 seconds, do the same as above, simply display a message saying you think their registration is automated and to try again, etc.
When used in conjunction I feel I've cut out 99.9999% of spam or false registrations. The timing method has to be done server side and stored in a session, and is fairly involved so not easy to do properly if you are new to web development. There is also the issue of someone hitting the back button to try again after a failed submission (if you don't use client-side validation), and them submitting from a cached page, but can be worked around if you know what you are doing.
Obviously its not bullet proof, and if the CSS file doesn't load then someone would see the extra form element. But its a small price to pay for effective protection.
Anyone else have other methods they use?
If taking a couple seconds to answer a CAPTCHA is too much effort, I probably don't really care what you have to say in the comment section.
It's not longer just a couple of seconds when one has to hit the reload button a dozen or so times before they get a CAPTCHA that's remotely readable.
And half the sites bit-bucket at least some of the data you've entered just as further punishment. So you have to type that in again.
Show me the captcha before I enter any data please. That alone would confuse half the bots out there. (For a while).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
People seem to forget that the term "CAPTCHA" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) applies to a much broader set of tests than just those obfuscated text-based things that most of us loathe. Banning CAPTCHAs is a silly notion that would adversely affect every site currently using them, as they become swarmed by spammers. Instead of banning them, they should be asking people to use sane, simple CAPTCHAs.
For instance, on a forum I run for a group in a game, I use a form of CAPTCHA that has people drag words into categories. As an example, if our group name was "Guild X of Y", I might make the categories "Words in our group's name" and "Words not in our group's name", then ask them to categorize the words "Guild", "Elephants", "X", "Tree", "Honor", "Plus", and "Ocean". I have about two dozen sets of categories and words configured, and so far it's had a 100% success rate at stopping spammers from registering. It's also made it easier for people to register, since the number of e-mails and other off-forum messages I've received complaining about the difficulty of the CAPTCHA has dropped to 0 while registrations have actually picked up.
Such a system would obviously not work for Google or someone that large, since a spammer would just train the bot to know all of the answers, but for smaller sites, there are plenty of solutions that work just fine, and I'm sure we can find more systems that are simple for a human but complicated for a computer. No need to make something that's so complicated for a human to solve.
Alternatively, go with xkcd's approach to solving the problem of spam.
You realize that many of the people complaining about captchas are blind, right?
Easily solved with an appropriate ALT tag, something like "A picture of a person holding a frankfurter in her right hand." In fact, can't all CAPTCHAS be fixed by simple use of the appropriate tag? "A picture of the characters E, Q, 3, 6, T and 9".
Bad guys run some pretty high traffic sites that oddly enough, require captchas. Their client bots forward the real site captcha to the bad-guy site, which delivers it to a human who wants access to the bad-guy site and answers it - which answer is passed back to the bot and submitted to the legitimate site in real time. They also compromise legitimate captcha-secured sites for the same method. It's the Mechanical Turk method of defeating CAPTCHA. Machine learning of text recognition is not required.
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