Bring back the capcatcha (sp)!

[HotelMinion]

So everytime I try to post something on some other sites a little box would appears demanding that I type in the words that appear. That was to send the bots and scammers packing I guess??? Being neither I found it annoying, especially when the words were "hidden" among other words so you'd have to squint.
But now they have a picture version of it filled with fuzzy photos. I used to find it so annoying that I wouldn't post at all! But now they're doing it for job boards. WTF. Are scammers and bots really that prevalent.
Anyone else find them annoying? I heard somewhere that someone uses them (the word ones) to decipher what is printed. Ummmm ok????

[EricKei]

CAPTCHA ? Yup. "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" -- It is indeed an anti-spam measure. If there's a place to input a free-form public message, someone will spam it x.x

Actually, yes, you are correct about the ones with two sets of words. One of them is a known one, and the other is an unknown. Basically, you're helping an OCR AI improve its accuracy. Thing is, the word-based ones were cracked years ago, so this is really the only good reason to keep using those.

There are other ones, too. I've seen one where you're supposed to pick out which tiles of a split-up photo, as a bot would theorestically have a harder time figuring it out. Another I see a TON on a site I work with is one where you just have to check a box; supposedly, it reads your mouse movements (speed, directions, etc) to determine whether or not you're a real human. Makes me really annoyed when I fail those x.x

[Jay 2K Winger]

I choose to believe that the new picture-based CAPTCHAs were implemented to prevent Inglip from amassing too much power.

[TheSHAD0W]

They're annoying, yes, and they're used to keep bots out. You'll typically only find them if the site has already had problems with bots.

Google's ReCaptcha is a free service that provides captchas like you describe. The service is free despite requiring a not-insignificant amount of resources to generate because Google mines the data and uses it for neural network training. You may notice a lot of "road sign", "road", "store front" images; this is because Google wants to use it for their mapping and their self-driving cars.

[MadMike]

Ironically, spammers have attempted to spam in this thread twice.

[Kit-Ginevra]

Just testing...