I am not a robot - The reCAPTCHA madness!
I understand the need (in certain situations) for programs designed to confirm our physical presence in this matrix-dream called life.
reCAPTCHA seem to be leading the way in this area and as a user of multiple faucets and other such sites which require proof of my existence in this physical realm, I am very familiar with the drill.
But to put it frankly, the process of selecting images of vehicles, gas stations, street signs, apartment buildings, store fronts and mountains is starting to drive me a little nuts.
The process (which was fun when I first started doing it) is now just plain tedious, especially as I seem to get it wrong time and time again, mostly due to the street signs or vehicles creeping just slightly into the edge of the white boxes, making it hard to know if this counts as a box that needs to be selected!
Surely there is a better way?
Sometimes reCAPTCHA gives us the option to type words instead of selecting boxes. Which I most definitely prefer!
The key difference being the time involved. I never get the words wrong and the ordeal is over in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.
In addition to this, the words themselves can be quite amusing and I have found a number of times that seem to say to me exactly what I need to hear in that moment!
I have found other versions of reCAPTCHA which require the answer to a simple maths calculation, based on some fuzzy-looking numbers moving around the screen. Yet somehow I still manage to get this wrong over and over. I am dyslexic and I think it's something to do with the moving numbers!
So my question remains... is there not a better way?
I would be really interested to hear suggestions from people.
And perhaps, if you can come up with some good ones I will write a stern email to reCAPTCHA listing them with the intention of preserving my sanity and more importantly saving me a bunch of time!
And if they change their system, I will reward the winning suggestion handsomely in Steem Dollars! How does 20SBD sound?
Hopefully I am not the only person on steemit who suffers from reCAPTCHA madness?
A better way is to allow 1 or 2 entries by an IP address, in a set time period, straight through without recapture test, robot or not.
After that, the test should appear as the chances it is a robot are much higher & a human much lower.
There is a much better way that does not require user interaction.
I've built and deployed this system on several forms on sites i run that were being hammered by spam bots.
To date, not one single bot has gotten through, and the users don't even know the difference. As far as they are concerned the form is not protected.
That's the difference between smart and really smart.
One day I'm going to write a tutorial on how I did it. But first I need to pay the bills etc....
42
The old recaptcha system which requires to write down two words that were not recognized by OCR programs was much better. The new recaptcha should realize you are not a robot and let you enter by just clicking it, but that almost never works. I read somewhere that not deleting cookies and hsitorial may help.
Retina scan
Of course there are better ways to do it.
You have to look at it from a different perspective.
Is it about testing, if you are a robot ?
yes.
But it is also about, let you do the work of a robot.
So, while you proof that you are a human, you do some work for somebody !
In this case i would suspect, google.
You are processing raw data.
Normally some parts of this "Codes" are already known, to test your proof !
And some parts are not processed yet.
So, half of the interaction is, you proving your humanity,
the other half is you doing digital work with proofed human knowledge.
(e.g. re-Captcha words:
one word is known, (if you get it right, you proved something)
the other word is maybe not known in digital form
(so if you get the first word right, you will automatically help to digtize the other word from a physical source)
So it's not only about the most elegant way to test you.
It's also kind of proved distributed data process.
As for me, the easiest captcha is one where you are highlighting a road sign. Just put 4 dots and ready.
Personally I prefer the mountains. Not sure why really. Nature is just more enjoyable to look at than man made suff :)