No, I'm not aware of any ongoing CAPTCHA work. There was a long thread on
wikitech-l starting last December ("Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly") that
resulted in some Phabricator tasks and a wikipage. But I don't know of any
active development plans.

By the way: Aaron's in transition (of the timezone variety) right now, so
it may be a day or so before he's able to respond to this thread.

- J

On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:53 PM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote:

> I thought that someone was already working on CAPTCHA improvents, but I
> can't remember who, and I haven't heard anything recently which makes me
> wonder if this was de-prioritized.
>
> J-mo, do you happen to know the status of the CAPTCHA work is, and who, if
> anyone, is active on that project?
>
> Pine
> On Aug 16, 2015 10:41 PM, "WereSpielChequers" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Kerry,
>>
>> there is an experiment going on that randomly opts half if new users into
>> V/E and leaves half using the classic editor. That should account for why
>> one of your newbies had been opted in but not the other.
>>
>> Captcha when adding citations is a longstanding problem, we need Captcha
>> on account creation to keep the spam bots at bay, but somehow it also
>> applies to newbies adding external links as cites, so we have a software
>> feature that doesn't effect the vandals but instead targets the best of our
>> newbies. My suspicion is that if we could work out when that was introduced
>> and then compare it to subsequent recruitment and retention we would find
>> that this was one of the most damaging mistakes we've made.
>>
>>
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>>
>> On 17 Aug 2015, at 04:56, Kerry Raymond <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> I ran my first training session using the Visual Editor this morning and
>> hit what appeared to be a show-shopping bug. It appeared that the two new
>> users (thankfully I had only 2) could not create a citation. They found
>> themselves in an infinite loop of Save Page with Capcha when they tried to
>> create a citation.
>>
>>
>>
>> By the end of the session, I managed to refine the bug to a combination
>> of “new user”, “new article” (although created by me, not the new users),
>> and citations involving a live URL, duly reported at
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#New_users_unable_to_create_citation_with_a_live_external_link_in_it
>>
>>
>>
>> Ironically it first happened on their newly created User Pages where we
>> were practising our new Wikipedia skills because tackling “real articles”.
>> Then on the “real articles” I had created earlier for them to use (a
>> training approach that has the benefit of not unleashing a horde of angry
>> watchlisters when they make some silly mistake, which occurs if you let new
>> people make their early edits on “popular articles”). (Spot the pattern,
>> both were new articles!).
>>
>>
>>
>> Now if this had happened to a new user sitting at home, they would have
>> been stymied. Because I was there to hold their hands in a training
>> setting, I found a way around the problem by logging them in as me and we
>> continued the training session on that basis (but not an option to the user
>> sitting at home frustratingly typing in Capcha responses until they got
>> frustrated and walked away).
>>
>>
>>
>> So, Aaron, it may be that your research on the impact of the VE was
>> impacted by this bug. I imagine that users affected would have eventually
>> aborted the edit as they were unable to save, unless by chance they were
>> able to realise that the problem was caused by their citation and either
>> removed the citation and just saved the text changes. It’s hard to say what
>> the likelihood of a new user being affected is, as the problem seemed to
>> relate to the age of the article (I am autopatrolled so I don’t think the
>> new articles would have any “might be dodgy” status flags on them, but I am
>> not familiar with how that side of things works).
>>
>>
>>
>> Also, is this experiment (or one similar) currently running? It’s just
>> that when we went into the Preferences of the two new user accounts to
>> enable the VE, one of them already had it enabled (yet I had seen both new
>> user accounts created in front of me a couple of minutes earlier), so there
>> was no possibility that this was anything other than a default setting for
>> one of the two users. I thought enabling the VE was normally strictly
>> opt-in?
>>
>>
>>
>> Kerry
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
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>>
>>


-- 
Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
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