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Re: I hate captchas

for

From: Gareth Dart
Date: Mar 13, 2007 6:20AM

There seems to be a belief common to designers of captchas that, as soon as their form goes live, a small red LED will start flashing at the board meeting of the World Evil Hacker Organisation. Shady figures will exchange nods and evil cackles, temporarily cease their endless stroking of long haired white cats whilst they direct their minions to do their worst, and then the combined resources of the world hacking community will be targeted solely upon the objective of cracking their form. If they have not made that image as hard to read as is humanly possible, then earthquakes will strike in Japan, lightning will flash down from the sky and ignite the world's rainforests, aliens will invade and Bob the website boss will be mildly peeved about all the spamming.

I expect this doesn't happen every time.

The character string just needs to be obfuscated enough so that a casual 'bot with limited intelligence will throw up it's figurative arms and skip off somewhere else (and therefore for anything really important, captchas are not sufficient). What they definitely shouldn't do is impair the user experience.

G