Finally finished my Zelda themed captcha, not a foolproof captcha but it works well enough for my small blog. Anyone have other captcha ideas, or ways to make it better?

http://zeldacaptcha.com

8/4/2011 3:58:41 PM

Don't use captchas

8/4/2011 4:14:26 PM

^pfft

^^Wow, at least that's fun. Realistically speaking I didn't see any specific part of that which would be difficult to break. It's just highly improbable anyone would waste their time for a small site.

A bit boring.... I made this and I'm pretty happy with the readability and (I think) the strength:


[Edited on August 4, 2011 at 4:31 PM. Reason : asdfasdf]

8/4/2011 4:30:46 PM

^nice, yea I think the overlapping letters would filter out a good number of bots, and people would be able to figure out the word from the context of the other letters.

Have you seen http://www.solvemedia.com/index_ss2.html? They don't use any blurring or scrambling so they can put advertisements in the ad. They say they have some or of technology that messes with the pixels so that it confuses OCR technology but is still readable to the user. Not sure if that's possible or not, I'm wondering if it's just bull so that they can force people to look at ads and not even care if they filter out bots.

8/4/2011 4:48:15 PM

http://uxmovement.com/forms/captchas-vs-spambots-why-the-checkbox-captcha-wins

[Edited on August 4, 2011 at 6:54 PM. Reason : This is fucking retarded]

8/4/2011 6:54:33 PM

^haha. facepalm

^^Holy shit, wow. Uh, yea sure that's clever, but advertising another product while someone is trying to sign up for yours seems dumb as hell. Everything on that website has a focus on revenue. In fact, their "white paper" is about brand recall; it doesn't even discuss the effectiveness of their captcha system, which frankly seems terrible.

Quote :

"Computer character recognition A number of research projects have attempted (often successfully) to beat visual CAPTCHAs by creating programs that contain the following functionality: 1. Pre-processing: Removal of background clutter and noise. 2. Segmentation: Splitting the image into regions which each contain a single character. 3. Classification: Identifying the character in each region. Steps 1 and 3 are easy tasks for computers. The only step where humans still outperform computers is segmentation. If the background clutter consists of shapes similar to letter shapes, and the letters are connected by this clutter, the segmentation becomes nearly impossible with current software. Hence, an effective CAPTCHA should focus on the segmentation."

That's basically why I jam letters together and use a roughly circular shape (I'm fairly certain this is a hell of a lot harder to break than a horizontal orientation). And I use a font that avoids distinctive lettering (if you have some unique squiggly on your Q or something, that's a dead give away). It's black and white since a bot is going to have no trouble with some stupid color differences.

[Edited on August 4, 2011 at 7:07 PM. Reason : asfasdf]

8/4/2011 7:04:58 PM

^I think you chose a good san serif font, a lot of the letters look the same when they're mashed against each other like DPRB, COQ.

And about the ad captcha, yea looks sketchy. I always thought captchas were a cat and mouse game, if someone wants to take the time to figure it out they can solve it (to a least some formidable percentage of success). And the harder you make it for bots, the harder it is for humans.

^^Doh, yea the javascript checkbox has just about the same effectiveness as my captcha, less awkwardness but less style points. Most bots aren't expecting a js loaded input field. I really like the honeypot idea, though a good bot should just look for visible fields... and render the javascript apparently.

8/5/2011 12:31:55 AM

i always put "assplay (real word)" for my captchas

8/5/2011 8:16:48 AM

That's awesome.

8/20/2011 10:22:34 PM

pretty cool

8/20/2011 10:33:15 PM