CAPTCHA Alternatives

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Expand view Topic review: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by Ken Saunders » March 16th, 2009, 4:52 pm

squillions

And again I learn.

Words ending in the sound "-illion", such as zillion,[2] jillion,[3] and gazillion,[4] are often used as fictitious names for an unspecified, large number by analogy to names of large numbers such as million, billion and trillion. Their size is dependent upon the context, but can typically be considered large enough to be unfathomable by the average human mind.

These terms are often used as hyperbole or for comic effect, or in loose, unconfined conversation to present an un-guessably large number. Since these are undefined, they have no mathematical validity and no accepted order, since none is necessarily larger or smaller than any of the others.

So I take it that you don't have an exact number?

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by Ken Saunders » March 16th, 2009, 4:48 pm

nefarious


See what I mean? I continue to be educated by this site.
nefarious:
abominable; atrociously sinful or villainous, extremely wicked

It takes a forum to raise a Mozillian. :)

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by steviex » March 16th, 2009, 1:44 pm

^ As noticed over on AMI, as poor Sheppard got bombarded by squillions of spam.....
He had to prevent new members from registering for a while....

He might still be having nightmares..... :vamp:

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by makaiguy » March 16th, 2009, 1:10 pm

Ken Saunders wrote:As far as how effective they are against spam? I can ass-u-me that they work rather well otherwise so many sites and services wouldn't be using them.

Never underestimate human ingenuity when nefarious motives are involved. The bad guys found ways to break (as in 'break a code') earlier CAPTCHA versions for vBulletin, phpBBS, and others, such that bots could register and post without human intervention. You can bet that some of the current generation CAPTCHAs have already been compromised and the bad guys are working hard to break the others.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by Ken Saunders » March 16th, 2009, 11:39 am

I bet the answer half of the time by new Firefox users would be Firefox and not Mozilla

No, no, no. They'd say Google. :)

By the way, this is my personal fav http://recaptcha.net/


That one is the best that I've come across to work with as a person with very crappy eyesight. Ever try a Google audio CAPTCHA?
It reminds me of when I was teen playing records backwards to hear all of the subliminal messages. Turns out that the messages were in my mind from the "experimental" unfiltered non-tobacco things that I was smoking.

reCAPTCHA is also great because I can zoom in as much as I need to and hit refresh as many times as I'd like to get a new CAPTCHA to solve.

As far as how effective they are against spam? I can ass-u-me that they work rather well otherwise so many sites and services wouldn't be using them.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by James » March 15th, 2009, 2:56 pm

Ngamer01 wrote:Questions like "Who makes Firefox?"

I bet the answer half of the time by new Firefox users would be Firefox and not Mozilla.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by LoudNoise » March 15th, 2009, 10:26 am

By the way, this is my personal fav http://recaptcha.net/ . Don't know how good it is at blocking but it is a cool idea. The audio version is also surprisingly easy to use.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by makaiguy » March 15th, 2009, 10:01 am

I've tried such questions as "How many legs does a cat have?" and "How many times does the letter A appear in the word MESSAGE?" and "Which of these is a color: RED, HOUSE, TREE?" but this still requires some degree of English comprehension and vocabulary.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by steviex » March 15th, 2009, 8:59 am

Also, we might have cultural problems....

Consider the question ...
'What shaped ball is Football played with ?? '

I would answer 'Round' .. Doug would answer 'Oval' .... :)

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by makaiguy » March 15th, 2009, 8:39 am

Ngamer01 wrote:You could nuke this problem once and for all by replacing CAPTCHAs with questions a human, but not a bot, would know. Questions like "Who makes Firefox?" for example. The beauty of questions is if by chance a bot master rigs a bot to bypass your question, you can just switch out the question to bust up their plans. >=D

So really the only thing that would be left to fear when using questions is live human spammers. But IP ban hammers work pretty well against them. =D


I agree, to an extent. The English-language bbs I administer went to such a system a couple of years ago and it worked wonders. An actual person can register and post, but the automated bots have disappeared. The hard part is coming up with questions that ANY human should be able to answer. That gets much more difficult here where we get posters from all over the world, and their English skills may be very limited. I wouldn't count on ANY level of familiarity with the program or its origins as a basis for the questions, either.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by Ngamer01 » March 15th, 2009, 7:00 am

You could nuke this problem once and for all by replacing CAPTCHAs with questions a human, but not a bot, would know. Questions like "Who makes Firefox?" for example. The beauty of questions is if by chance a bot master rigs a bot to bypass your question, you can just switch out the question to bust up their plans. >=D

So really the only thing that would be left to fear when using questions is live human spammers. But IP ban hammers work pretty well against them. =D

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by steviex » March 15th, 2009, 3:26 am

Oh, yes... And then the Post Bomber arrived .......

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by James » March 14th, 2009, 11:39 pm

The amount of spam we get right now pales in comparison to say three years ago.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by onehundredandtwo » March 14th, 2009, 9:39 pm

LoudNoise wrote:Ah, well no. We are great believers in making our users suffer. We think it will make them stronger. :)
:lol:

I guess if it isn't a real problem in the first place then there isn't any point.

Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

by LoudNoise » March 14th, 2009, 9:26 pm

Ah, well no. We are great believers in making our users suffer. We think it will make them stronger. :)

That said, the bots haven't broke it yet. If you don't believe me see viewtopic.php?t=598299 . We are getting the attention of our Admins to beef that and other things up.

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