January 21, 2005
Too advanced Captchas?

I got served the below Captcha when registering for a Yahoo! Group the other day. Seriously, is that a 6? a non-capital b? σ? Is that an e, ẹ or an ę? How about the W? .. or is it a Σ?

A Yahoo Captcha

When captchas get so funky that humans with 20/20 vision start struggling; accessibility is far away...

Furhter reading:

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Comments

You're going to love this one. I got a similarly difficult to read captcha several months back when trying to sign up for .NET just so I could read a particular message board group on MSN where my weblog had been linked.

However, the good thing about this particular captcha, it had an option that if you couldn't read it, to click a button and a sound file would read the letters out loud to you. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand certain letters in the reading. Like, it didn't say "Z" as as in "Zebra."

So, for someone with pretty good vision and excellent hearing, I never did find out what the message board post said about me or my blog.

Posted by: Marie on January 21, 2005 08:41 PM

Those captcha's always remind me of Dingbats problems! I keep expecting to get a flash of inspiration and shout out 'over the hills and far away' or some such. Unfortunately I seem to have as many problems deciphering captcha's as I do Dingbats!

Posted by: scuba girl on January 22, 2005 03:50 PM

One drawback is that people will probably be less enthusiastic about posting comments when they do not even get the treat of a good link. Good comments are contributing some value to the original blog post.

Posted by: Jon Berg on January 25, 2005 11:18 AM

Forget captcha, and force your blog operator to implement the "rel=nofollow" keyword pushed by Google

Posted by: Electrician on March 2, 2005 12:52 PM
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Armswiper's Blog: Why Captchas Don't Work (January 21, 2005 09:42 PM)
"

Here's a pretty good example of why Captchas are a very good way of stopping spammers from signing up for things. With this level of obscurity, it's getting kind of ridiculous.

I read a little while ago that most Captchas can be read by standa...

"

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