Sunday, October 28, 2012

READING THOSE SQUIGGLY LETTERS TO CONFUSE BOTS IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE EVEN FOR HONEST PEOPLE WITH POOR EYESIGHT.


As I sit at my computer wondering what else I have to do to prepare for Hurricane Sandy, I have been catching up on many of the blogs and emails I hadn't had the opportunity to read.  On one blog I wanted to leave a comment.  I wrote out what I wanted to say and hit publish.  I got one of those SPAM defender thingies that twists letters to make them illegible to the bot.  However, I am not a bot and they are illegible to me with my blossoming macular degeneration.

Using a magnifying glass, it usually takes me several tries to get the letters correct.   When I make reservations at my favorite  jazz club, I encounter the same problem,as I do in some other sites.  It would be great if someone invented another way of giving an answer that a bot could not do, such as a problem of logic or deduction.  Perhaps  there could be a choice of what a bot cannot do but a reasonably sighted human could do?

Just to add to my confusion, I went to ASK.com with the question 
I learned those little boxes might be called CAPTCHA.  I know that when I read: 'Best Practices for Preventing BuddyPress Spam User Registrations on that linked site, I was left more confused and depressed than before I asked the question.  Oh well, solutions aren't always simple, are they?
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1 comment:

Unknown said...

I agree that CAPTCHAs are almost impossible to read! I also have bad eye sight and byt the time I have managed to read through a CAPTCHA I have a migraine on my hands!
I started using CAPTCHA bypass browser extension software to help me out with commenting on blogs. It reads the CAPTCHA and fills it in for you. So far, it seems to work perfectly. The address is skipinput.com if you would like to give it a try and give your eyes a break.
All the best!
Ally