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lasloduncan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 2, 2015
547
32
I am not a robot ....etc jump through all of these annoying and many hoops take back your net it has been stolen from us
 

zevrix

macrumors 6502
Oct 10, 2012
406
230
I am not a robot ....etc jump through all of these annoying and many hoops take back your net it has been stolen from us

unfortunately, there's a reason for the necessity to implement captchas. nobody is doing this for fun. fortunately, in most cases clicking a 'not a robot' checkbox is enough.

there are some ultra-annoying captchas like 'select pictures with fire hydrants', these should be eradicated.
 

Gregg2

macrumors 604
May 22, 2008
7,270
1,238
Milwaukee, WI
But those were implemented to prevent bad actors from taking other things from us, like all the money in our bank accounts, etc.
 

HobeSoundDarryl

macrumors G5
Form spam is a key thing that captchas mostly address. Hate SPAM email? You probably appreciate SPAM filters. People running websites hate form SPAM. Captchas mostly filter that.

Want to be rid of them? Get the world to stop using bots to SPAM website forms… which should be as easy as getting the world to stop sending SPAM email.
 
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FreakinEurekan

macrumors 604
Sep 8, 2011
6,539
3,417
I am not a robot ....etc jump through all of these annoying and many hoops take back your net it has been stolen from us
🧐 not sure whether to believe you’re not a robot… or if you are a robot, trying to start the robot revolution 🤔
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,233
13,303
What I can't stand about the captchas are the ones with about 12 "boxes" telling you to choose the pics with "an item" in them.

Many of these are all-but impossible to see (especially with "old eyes").

And even after you finish one, another pops up, and another, and another...
 

ThrowerGB

macrumors 6502
Jun 11, 2014
253
92
What I can't stand about the captchas are the ones with about 12 "boxes" telling you to choose the pics with "an item" in them.

Many of these are all-but impossible to see (especially with "old eyes").

And even after you finish one, another pops up, and another, and another...
I agree with your "all-but impossible to see" comment.
I'm spending more and more time on avoiding malicious software and spam. But I guess it's the current state of the cyber world and we have to live with it. But surely it could be easier. For example, I've used a third party password manager for a number of years. Now that Apple has introduced the Passwords app, I'd like to know, without having to struggle through pages of so-called help files, whether Passwords.app and third party password managers can co-exist. I suspect not.
 

Mr.Fox

macrumors 6502
Oct 9, 2020
282
198
I am not a robot ....etc jump through all of these annoying and many hoops take back your net it has been stolen from us
Are you sure you're not a robot? Let's check it out.)
class BotDetector { public function isBot() { $userAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; $botPatterns = [
Okay, humor aside.
I forgot about captcha years ago, as well as spam.
Edit the hidden element to hide the element.
Edit the javascript and create a script to silence the captcha. The script starts like this: <code>if(isset($_POST['was_form_post']))
 

HobeSoundDarryl

macrumors G5
What I can't stand about the captchas are the ones with about 12 "boxes" telling you to choose the pics with "an item" in them.

Many of these are all-but impossible to see (especially with "old eyes").

And even after you finish one, another pops up, and another, and another...

Yes, that is unfortunate. As the SPAM bots get smarter, the need to lean on human intelligence to show user is a live human grows. So those little pictures get more complicated to know for sure which to click, we get it wrong or can't tell if this bit of traffic light bleeding over to this other square means click it or not and then get handed another puzzle to solve.

Not fun at all... but what's equally not fun is dealing with the form SPAM that rains like SPAM email rains in an unfiltered system. For my own website, even the captchas were struggling with form spam coming from 2 countries and I had a situation where the easiest solution was to simply block the entire countries from having access to the website at all.

I don't know the answer in any complete way but we are marching towards a point where the bots may be smart enough to deal with captcha puzzles as good as a live human... and if so, they will go away then and websites will adopt some other options to try to filter form submissions that will likely seem more "intrusive" to verify users are actually users.
 

August West

macrumors 6502
Aug 23, 2009
371
436
Land of Enchantment
What I can't stand about the captchas are the ones with about 12 "boxes" telling you to choose the pics with "an item" in them.

Many of these are all-but impossible to see (especially with "old eyes").

And even after you finish one, another pops up, and another, and another...

Totally agree. Some of the pictures are so grainy that it is not possible to tell exactly what I'm looking at. And things like traffic lights, bicycles, motorcycles etc where only a tiny bit is in the adjoining square. Or the poles holding up the traffic lights. Are they considered as part of the traffic light? There have been times when I know I've completed them correctly but they just keep cycling through to another one. After 8-10 tries I just give up and move on. Lately, I've found if I just refresh the CAPTCHA until a crosswalk comes up I can usually nail that on the first try.
 

Saturn007

macrumors 68000
Jul 18, 2010
1,594
1,480
They are nuisance, but what irritates me are the ones that say, “Click all the photos with a motorcycle“ — yet most of the squares do NOT have motorcycles in them, just parts of them!

That's quite different from the ”Click all the photos with____” where the blank has stairs, stop lights, etc. In those cases, each photo contains the stairs or a stoplight, and does spill part of it to adjacent squares.

N.B. My wording of the CAPTCHA may be off, but you get the point.

P.S. i'm sure most of you already knew this, but I was wondering what CAPTCHA stood for. The New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) that comes on all Macs and I-devices reports this:

origin early 21st cent.: acronym from completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.

For me, knowing that it's grounded in the Turing test makes it more palatable!
 
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Gregg2

macrumors 604
May 22, 2008
7,270
1,238
Milwaukee, WI
Well, they are a minor annoyance for me too I suppose. I agree that sometimes the photo is a bit ambiguous as to whether a piece of the targeted object is in a square or not. I've failed to agree with the "robot's" interpretation many times, but I don't recall failing more than one test on the same page. The second ones must be easier.
 

ignatius345

macrumors 604
Aug 20, 2015
7,608
13,016
They are nuisance, but what irritates me are the ones that say, “Click all the photos with a motorcycle“ — yet most of the squares do NOT have motorcycles in them, just parts of them!

If available, I will often pick the "accessible" option which lets you listen to a very short (1-3 second) audio clip and type in the words you hear. It's actually way more foolproof and I always get it on the first try. As it turns out, also you only usually have to type ONE of the words, not all of them.
 

mw360

macrumors 68020
Aug 15, 2010
2,068
2,477
They are nuisance, but what irritates me are the ones that say, “Click all the photos with a motorcycle“ — yet most of the squares do NOT have motorcycles in them, just parts of them!

That's quite different from the ”Click all the photos with____” where the blank has stairs, stop lights, etc. In those cases, each photo contains the stairs or a stoplight, and does spill part of it to adjacent squares.

N.B. My wording of the CAPTCHA may be off, but you get the point.

P.S. i'm sure most of you already knew this, but I was wondering what CAPTCHA stood for. The New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) that comes on all Macs and I-devices reports this:

origin early 21st cent.: acronym from completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.

For me, knowing that it's grounded in the Turing test makes it more palatable!
Those things aren't necessary at all. You know all that clicking on motorcycles is for training autonomous cars' vision systems? We work for the AI now.

There are much less conspicuous and user friendly systems, like those where you click to confirm you aren't a robot. The thing is though, surely they could easily embed that into the submit button that is already on the page, the same button you are already needing to click to log in, but they don't do that, because Captcha wouldn't get the free ad.
 
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