Comments | cellio: Blogger captchas

cellio

Blogger captchas

Apr 28, 2008 08:53

Dear Blogger users,

I would like to be able to comment on your posts at times, but the Blogger captcha (the prove-you're-a-human-and-not-a-spambot image with distorted letters) has been getting harder and harder to read over the last several months, such that it usually takes me 3-4 tries and today I failed after 8. I infer that clicking on the ( Read more... )

vision, usability

Comments 16

merle_ April 28 2008, 13:28:26 UTC

I have had the same problem. What, do they think bots run the images through OCR software?

More irritating, on some sites (dailyping.com) the captcha simply does not work under Safari or Opera, meaning I would have to use IE or FF. I can't fathom why something as simple as an image and a text box would be browser-specific, but it is.

cellio April 29 2008, 03:15:18 UTC

More irritating, on some sites (dailyping.com) the captcha simply does not work under Safari or Opera

Gah. Yeah, that seems pretty lame. What in the implementation is browser-dependant?

merle_ April 29 2008, 03:27:28 UTC

Honestly, I have no idea. I've been doing web development since before AOL knew of the internet, and can't imagine how that could happen. IE-specific ActiveX things, sure, but with it working in FireFox as well?

jducoeur April 29 2008, 20:47:40 UTC

What, do they think bots run the images through OCR software?

Well -- yeah. Actually, as far as I can tell, most of the bots are more sophisticated than most current OCR software. (Note that, for all that the captchas are hard to read, the bots are *still* managing to crack many of them: there was a great do-to recently when the malware started successfully cracking Google's captchas...)

Thread 6

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cellio April 29 2008, 03:18:41 UTC

Aha. Thanks.

shewhomust April 28 2008, 14:24:15 UTC

Oh, I'm glad it's not just me! (I'm sorry you're having trouble too, but I was beginning to think I was just being stupid...)

cahwyguy April 28 2008, 14:35:39 UTC

Use OpenID, and sign in with your livejournal id.

cellio April 29 2008, 03:22:12 UTC

Thanks. If I use OpenID, am I giving a third party my LJ password? (I presume not, but I haven't used that before.)

cahwyguy April 29 2008, 03:37:04 UTC

No, you actually log into LJ, and it just sends a verification that you successfully authenticated there.
`

byronhaverford April 28 2008, 19:52:00 UTC

Perhaps they have a new supplier. I've found the known half of reCAPTCHA to be more difficult than the usual CAPTCHAs.

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

cellio April 29 2008, 03:24:58 UTC

I hadn't heard of reCAPTCHA before. Cool idea; too bad the implementation is giving you difficulty.