Are reCAPTCHA CAPTCHAs getting harder or is just m

Question

As I have been testing sites, I have found reCAPTCHAs getting more and more difficult to read. Is it just me or are others having this problem too?

Along with this, I had a user this morning complain about receiving a Bristish Pound character in their reCAPTCHA. Of course the user didn't know what to do, even though I have message stating they can click the reload/refresh icon to get a new CAPTCHA.

Unfortunately, this implementation is on a site often used by people over 60 years of age, so more complicated or confusing CAPTCHAs are a problem, but the site still receives a lot of people attempting to produce spam.

Answer 1

I think eventually CAPTCHA is going to stop being feasible and there's going to have to be some kind of universally recognized "passport" system for websites. Some kind of account that you pay a couple bucks for and it identifies you as a human when you sign up for a website.

Then, if you start using that account for your spam robots, you can get banned universally. Sites could even retroactively clean up posts based on those bans. shrug Just a thought

Answer 2

I've been identified as not-human several times by the Stack Overflow blog comment captcha. Now I just keep requesting new captchas until I get one I can read. Usually only takes ~3 tries.

Update: According to Ben Maurer, the Chief Engineer at reCAPTCHA, who commented on my blog about this, over 96% of reCAPTCHAs are solved correctly. So maybe we as a group are just getting dumber?

Answer 3

I have a hard time reading most Captcha's, but I agree that reCAPTCHA's are a special nuisance.

Answer 4

Yes, Captchas are getting more difficult to read.

Image of CAPTCHA http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/1253/picture3rs8.png

I can't find the link right now but I believe the Microsoft Passport (MSN and Hotmail) are the hardest ones to break.

The problem is that whenever software gets better at detecting the text, the text has to become more difficult to read.

The irony I guess is that CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" but it won't be long for computers to catch up and they become too hard for the majority of humans to read. At this time they'll go away and some other version of a CAPTCHA will be used.

Perhaps photo based CAPTCHAS using googles image labelling system?

Answer 5

Perhaps reCAPTCHA, as it starts to run lower on words that people get correctly, starts paring harder and harder 'unknkown' words as people filter out all the easy ones?

Answer 6

Yes, it is getting harder. What ever may be the good thing it does, it should be usable. I tried 3 or 4 times on their audio captcha and failed each time. Though captchas try to solve a real issue, for those who can not see the captcha image and have to rely on audio captchas it is a big problem. Also not all the sites which uses captcha provides audio options. In any case, I think we'll have to keep proving to these machines that we are indeed humans for a long time to come.