Hi everyone, I've read enough comments here where people say they really hate captchas and I've seen some weird ones myself to be sure. As a directory owner though I am hesitant to take them down because I'm afraid the number of automated submissions will get too high and so will the number of spam site I have to check. So, what do you guys think about this light captchas I have on my submit page: http://www.typelinks.com/submit.php Would you still consider something like that a hassle? Anyone's got any tip on alternative methods of combating spam?
Easy to read but not that secure... http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/ You need different fonts and to do some transforms on the characters... more lines, etc, in the background. Probably would do the job you want, but that above link is an interesting read on the viability of current captchas.
Well, I guess I am just trying to fend off some amateur attempts on automated submissions. If someone experienced and motivated enough really wants to break a captcha (any captcha), wouldn’t they just hire humans for that job? So the idea is to balance security (little bit thereof) and convenience for human visitors. Would you say such light captcha does the balancing job right? Thanks for the link!
Thanks, TheHoff. That's comforting to know. BTW, the link you send is a very interesting reading. I would not want to actually mess with my own captchas (like, create a custom set) but it's interesting to see that some capthas that would be most likely frown upon by users here for hard-to-read-ness have like 92% rate of automated recognition. I guess mine gets like 99.5%
it would take me 1 hour to write a script that will break this captcha 100% every time. You need to do alot of changes to it. The letters should be different font types, different colors They shouldn't be on the same line. They need to go up and down. Each letter needs to be rotated individually. Look at the myspace or google captcha. They are good.
to be honest they are one of the weakest captcha's on the web at the moment. No disrespect intended to the script but I'm being blunt and honest here. If you have to use that script you'd be well advised to employ the services of an0n (a member here) to install something a little more secure.
Long standing topic... Thanks for your comment, guys. I do hate that captcha but I since made that directory slightly paid and that takes care of bad submissions - they just go to the trash bin.