Saturday, August 21, 2010

Enough CAPTCHA! Seriously... Enough!

Craigslist! I understand the need to filter out douchebags, scammers and automated spiders. I get it! but goddamn CAPTCHA is just ridiculous. The only people confused by nonsense words are people who speak the english language. Nigerian con-men and spider programs would be just as easily confused by real words as by the garbage words captcha produces.

That said, today Captcha reached a new low... I may be old and stuck in my ways, but I think everyone would agree that the characters you need to type in should at least exist on the keyboard. See the image below. This was an actual screen capture as I tried to sell an item on the local craigslist.
I realize everything is made in China, but has it really come to this?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lmao! That is a bit extreme!

Btw- the first time your own captcha wasn't working very well, I got the little "x" box with the words "visual verification" right beside it, I had to hit refresh for it to work. Just thought I'd throw that out there, lol.

Flash said...

Not sure if you're aware of it, but the captcha of that style come from a book scanning project. Any words that the optical character recognition program cannot decipher get put into the captcha rounds, until enough people provide the same answer that the program can be sure of the actual word. The other option would be to pay someone to read each and every word. This was a way to allow the non-profit scanning project to keep costs low, and Google was so impressed that they purchased it.

Jonathan Hine said...

LOL! As I'm reading these comments, my captcha required words for posting MY reply are "ysternig was". Guess political correctness is not a catcha requirement. Sorry, yes, the only reason for this comments was this. Made me laugh. (And no, NOT offended).