RECAPTCHA's are user-hostile, horrendous for accesibility, and should only ever be temporarily implemented as a last resort
I'd give my left pinky to make RECAPTCHA disappear forever
@vantablack they're also discriminatory to robots by design
@dr1ft What about no
@vantablack tho, my usual issue with this thinking : have you seen any other captcha and how terrifyingly worse or less efficient they are
@CobaltVelvet old-style captcha's I could usually do in 5 seconds
recaptcha's take at least 40
@vantablack have you tried giving it cookies
@vantablack While I really don't like recaptchas either, I very much do see the value of them as someone who runs a public forum/discussion board.
If you don't put a captcha on the signup form (or a weak, old-style one) we get like 10-20 spam bots per day in a forum with maybe 20 active users
@elomatreb @vantablack I help moderate a forum (about EDM, drugs advice etc) and the admins have had to put captchas for this reason although they are now either the ones where you look for road signs etc or sometimes don't have pictures at all (I think those look for irregularity in mouse movements)
@vfrmedia
Yeah, those are recaptchas from Google, pretty much the only ones that still work against spammers
@vantablack
@vfrmedia @vantablack
They work by comparing your answers to answers of an AI, with some known positives
mentions of drugs use Show more
@elomatreb @vantablack I'm on a forum that has gone to manual approval for registrations due to spammers.
They use some profile metadata - it's a car forum, so what car you have, and then location - as a sanity check.
If someone puts garbage in those fields, they're a spammer. If someone says that they're in the US, but that they own a 2001 Audi A2, which wasn't ever sold in the US - they're a spammer. If they say they're from the UK, but their IP is in Russia...
@elomatreb @vantablack And then, the final level of approval is the scream test - if an account is suspicious and got treated as a spammer, but they complain to the support e-mail... then their account gets moved from banned spammers to confirmed users.
@bhtooefr IPs can get a lot of false-positives, e.g. if your ISP trades IP blocks around a lot you end up showing up as different countries every day (some German ISPs are infamous for this)
@bhtooefr @vantablack We had manual approval for a while as well (due to the forum software breaking captcha support 🙃), but if there are only a handful of moderators that can approve users it can take a prohibitively long time for people to get approved.
And due to the nature of the forum many people just sign up, ask one or a few quick questions, and don't really stick around, and this type of user is seriously inconvenienced by manual approval
@elomatreb @vantablack I also suspect that some of this is part of why people go to places like Facebook Groups and Reddit to start communities - the registration wall was already implemented by those platforms and your users are already registered.
(Of course, that's the problem, too - just because the platform's validated the person doesn't mean you want them in your community...)
@bhtooefr In this special case the target audience is very much the older generations (it's a forum about certain folding camping caravans), and they can use forum software OK but anything that breaks the visual/UI patterns of phpbb of 2005 has to be explained, so moving to other platforms isn't really an option
@bhtooefr
Then they might be using a VPN
@elomatreb
@vantablack @elomatreb That's what the scream test is for, though. If they complain, then they weren't actually a spammer, and you validate them.
@vantablack CAPTCHAs by design are somewhat hostile, it's a defensive measure after all.
Although I agree that what's Recaptcha's doing now when your IP address falls out of favor with Google is beyond good and evil.
They didn't start out this way though. The purpose of original Recaptca (before Google) was IMO quite noble - to scan books. And they had an audio option.
@vantablack As a user, I find Privacy Pass extension helpful.
like, there's NO excuse
n o n e