captcha sucks!! (sry)

i am logged in and i need to vill in the captcha phrase why???

Because you have less than a certain number of posts and we have big problems with spammers. Be mad at the spammers, not me.

FYI, places like digg.com also require captcha for logged in users.

The new captcha is easier to read, but you still need to get rid of the ambiguous 1 and l and any other characters that cannot be uniquely identified when they appear within the context of a random string of alpha characters and numbers.

If using the Forum is too error prone for new users, due to incorrectly entered captchas due to ambiguous characters, they will go elsewhere.

Im not mad at you but i dislike captchas if theres a captcha it must be readable ( sumethimes i get Il1i as a captcha) and that is bothering me nothing else i luv this site (= and its helps me with almost all my problems (php an mysql related offcource (=) speek ya guys later (= i did 5 minutes on submitting my message and it keep saying i didnt filled it in good

I understand that the captcha thing is probably necessary, but it's a real b*stard when you've spent half an hour carefully typing in a bunch of stuff to have it vaporised just because you mis-typed the captcha string. The system could at least give you your post data back so you can try again. How about it, sysadmins?

Because the captcha is so error prone and makes use of ambiguous characters, I always select and copy the contents of the message window to the clipboard before posting in case it is necessary to re-post when a captcha error occurs.

In fact, I believe that the captcha logic contains errors as values that have been entered correctly, with no ambiguity, fail.

Hmmm, I wonder how many posts I need to make to not need to enter a cpatcha string...

Oops! speling eror

I believe that it is around 50, however i wouldnt post just to get past the captcha's. Are you finding it difficult to read the font?

Hi Andrew,

Yes, I have poor eyesight and I have great difficulty distinguishing between I and 1, O and 0, and a couple of others.

<rant> It would be great if the sysadmins could do something about this situation. I have just found this site, and it looks like a good one, but I spent half an hour earlier today answering somebody's question only to have my hard work go up in smoke because I got the captcha wrong -- and I couldn't be arsed to re-type all my work, so somebody didn't get their question answered. I read the thread in General Chat about captchas and agree with the sentiment that they don't have to be 100% bullet-proof, just good enough that spambots move on to another site. So, if Matt & co could remove the offending (confusing) characters that would be great. Also, as per my previous posts, it would help if they did the (standard, web form) thing of echoing your input back to you when something fails a validation test. I remember forms that dumped you back to blank input boxes when people first started coding web-based applications, but that was back in 1994. I thought the world had moved on since then, but it seems I wasn't 100% right ) </rant>

Must go and have a little lie-down.

I don't have experience with the captcha on this site, but I agree that generally they are quite frustrating. I think a good character set for a captcha would contain the letters A-Z, all uppercase except for i and s, which would be lowercase, and O which would be completely dropped out. In addition to those it would have numbers 2-9. It should also be made case-insensitive. That way most complications could be avoided.



I'd yell at people who develop web browsers. Taking this into account while coding web applications on every form just makes the code more fuzzy. Opera doesn't leave you with a blank form ;)

When ever ive used Captcha's ive always used numbers or letters. This in my opinion removes most confusion. Ive pm'd matt with this suggestion. It might be feasible and i dont think it would make the captcha any less effective.

Good?

Looks good to me! Thanks, Matt.

Though, on further thought, how about adding in some lowercase letters?

You can safely add an uppercase L and lowercase i, d and b.

Those should be enough, though. We don't have to make it brute-force safe ;)