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Re: I hate captchas

for

From: John E. Brandt
Date: Mar 13, 2007 9:30AM

I'm not sure captchas even do what they are supposed to do.

I was using phpBB on one of my servers and despite the captcha element, I
was getting spam-bots by the dozen each day. It just got worse and worse so
I took the phpBB offline.

It sounds like we need a new method.

~j


John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Penny Roberts
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 5:48 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] I hate captchas

I know that you know this: no need to reply. I just need to share...

<vent>
I hate chaptchas. Four times over the weekend (on completely different
sites) I had to use the damn things and *every *single *time* I got it wrong
at the first attempt. One was so unclear that I asked Kev to take a look
and between us we agreed what the character was. Ha! we were both wrong.
One of them was particularly galling because it was at the bottom of
a form. One of the firlds on the form was a date and it had a handy dandy
JavaScript date picker... which told me that I didn't have authority to use
it! So I had to type the date in manually but there was no clue as to the
format they required. So I took a guess and got it wrong... twice (so three
attempts). And each time the B!@@%y captcha changed!
</vent>


Thank you for your time,
Penny