The main reason our captcha is easy for bots to bypass isn't because it's easy to read (it's not); it's because it works the same way as 90% of other captcha's on the internet. So if you're a spam-bot writer, all you have to do is download one of the dozens of generic captcha-breaking programs on the internet and point it at Wikipedia. I imagine about half of them would be able to break our captcha out of the box. We could deter the majority of spam-bots just by having a unique type of captcha. And it doesn't have to be one that is difficult for humans to solve, just one that would require a halfway significant investment for a programmer to solve. In other words, I don't think that making our captcha easier necessarily means getting more spambots. We just have to jump out of the existing captcha design band-wagon. Here are some ideas:
1. Show an animated GIF of a scrolling marquee that reveals a word 2. Show an animated GIF that sequentially unblurs the letters in the captcha (from an initially totally blurred state) and then reblurs them in a cycle 3. Show three words in different shades of grey and ask the user to type the darkest word (too trivial?) Surely we can come up with a creative idea that is: * Easy for humans to solve * Can't be solved by out-of-the-box captcha breakers * Isn't trivial for programmers to solve Kaldari On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Chad <innocentkil...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed Dec 03 2014 at 1:27:33 PM svetlana <svetl...@fastmail.com.au> > wrote: > > > I like these thoughts: > > - https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014- > > November/079340.html "Literally an anti-captcha. Letting bots in and > > keeping humans out." > > - https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014- > > November/079346.html "Why not disable the ConfirmEdit extension for a > > week and see what happens?" > > > > Shoulw we go to a wiki and see if we can gain local consensus on such > > move? Which wiki would be better, a bigger one or a smaller one, for a > > start? > > > > > mw.org? Find one or two other devs and you've got consensus :) > > -Chad > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
