
I can no longer solve ReCAPTHCA captchas - pbhjpbhj
For a time there were lots of number based captchas on ReCAPTCHA using sites - presumably for Google Maps - but now they all appear to be a random mixture of letters. I can not solve them.<p>They&#x27;re things like &quot;rnmnnihmr&quot; which is barely legible in plain text but when obfuscated - grunged, blurred and waved - I find it&#x27;s taking about 8 tries before I <i>guess</i> the answer correctly.<p>Reportedly there are bots getting 90% correct.<p>Mainly this is just a statement of frustration but in part it&#x27;s a question of &quot;doesn&#x27;t this mean we&#x27;ve largely solved OCR now?&quot;.<p>[I think the last time ReCAPTCHA was discussed was this - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6615326.]
======
IvyMike
Supposedly reCAPTCHA is _easier_ if google thinks you're human.

[http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-
just-got-easier-but-only-if.html)

I guess google thinks you are a robot.

I dunno, in my experience I usually don't second-guess google. Sorry to break
it to you.

~~~
IvyMike
To add a bit of seriousness back into this: Google is being coy about how they
guess at humanness/robotness, but IP address is a likely factor. Maybe the OP
is coming from an IP address or block that has a lot of robot activity on it.

~~~
oakwhiz
I am fairly certain that one of the factors is whether or not you are signed
into a Google account.

------
malbs
I felt like I was alone with this problem. I have been unable to solve some
reCAPTCHA generated puzzles for about 6 months now. There was one particular
site, I badly wanted to complete the registration form, but after about the
7th or 8th attempt at solving the captcha, I just decided it wasn't worth it.
Now I don't even bother? reCAPTCHA? Bye.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yep.

And for the love of all that's holy I wish they'd stop using characters that
are impossible to distinguish in the mangled font. Is that 0? O? 1? I? l?.

Also, if they're going to make it case-sensitive, they shouldn't use ANY
characters that look almost the same in upper and lower-case (especially when
there's no baseline). Is that p? P? w? W?

------
adventured
I've found a combination of posting frequency (if more than x posts in x time)
+ hidden form honeypots + time-to-submit timer + nofollow links + some simple
filtering rules/checks on text and links, all but eradicates spam without the
need for captchas (with or without user accounts). Common bots still can't
make it through that gauntlet, and it's very easy to refine it, even if you're
being aggressive, such that humans make it through without a problem.

------
redxblood
Did you know only one of the two pieces of text is really there to determine
if you're a human?

The other is so you translate for them digital photography into text. Those
assholes make us waste time so they make money.

~~~
datawander
You realize the same exact thing could be said about video game designers,
right?

~~~
Houshalter
Video game designers aren't forcing me to play their game in order to submit
necessary forms.

------
sarreph
_Winning Tic Tac Toe_ is my favourite:

[http://www.getelastic.com/6-captcha-alternatives-to-
improve-...](http://www.getelastic.com/6-captcha-alternatives-to-improve-
conversion/)

~~~
letstryagain
100% success rate for bots. How is that a useful CAPTCHA?

~~~
gknoy
Well, the really smart ones know not to play.

~~~
kendalk
"General, you are listening to a machine. Do the world a favor and don't act
like one." \-- Dr. Stephen Falken, "WarGames" (1983)

------
awiesenhofer
I too noticed this, particularly while on proxies during testing.

My biggest frustration with captchas isn't even having to try multiple times,
it's having to enter most or sometimes all my info again and again.

I know this is not really reCAPTCHAs fault but the font-end guys, still what I
would love to see is an independent reCAPTCHA-submit, meaning I don't have to
submit the complete form and hope I guessed correctly, instead I only submit
after I know I nailed the challenge. Similar to email-verification or
password-strengh-checks it could report this to me on-the-fly.

------
Killswitch
I hate CAPTCHA. If I go to your site to sign up or anything and get a CAPTCHA,
I will try it twice. After that I move on.

It's not hard to combat spam without forcing such nefarious acts onto your
users.

------
manicdee
CAPTCHAs have always suffered from keming.

I hate CAPTCHA, and avoid using sites that require me to use them every time I
post a comment even though I'm a registered user of the site.

~~~
LearnAndBurn
I figured keming was a joke about kerning. Never heard it before, so thanks!
Posting to save other people time:
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Keming&defid=...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Keming&defid=2872417)

~~~
jcrawfordor
You know, the fact that it's in urban dictionary doesn't mean it's not a joke
about kerning.

~~~
dkuntz2
The Urban Dictionary entry was about bad kerning...

------
minimaxir
I'll ask the obvious question: are you a human? :)

~~~
freshyill
I kind of like the idea of spambot creators programming their spambots to post
to HN and complain about ReCaptcha, in an effort to get people to stop using
it.

------
nickfox
I also can no longer read reCaptcha. So I did the smart thing and got rid of
it. Instead, I've been using this:

[http://www.nucaptcha.com/](http://www.nucaptcha.com/)

A MILLION times better. It's actually a pleasure to use. I've had no problems
with it at all. Go to my website websmithing.com if you want to see it in
action.

Death to reCaptcha. Your usefulness as a product is diminishing.

------
Houshalter
Captcha is dying as computer vision improves. However similar technologies
also make automated spam filtering much easier. There are tons of available
datapoints to figure out what accounts are bots. IP, how they behave, the
times they log in, browser details, etc, and mainly the contents of the text
they post.

------
JoeAltmaier
I totally absolve myself from captchas. If its required, I don't go there. Its
demeaning, I hate it. I'm not going to struggle with some frickin game to help
your website do whatever those are supposed to do, so get over it, web
designers.

~~~
dragonwriter
What they are supposed to do is help prevent a website that accepts and
presents user-supplied content from being overwhelmed with automated spam.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Which is nothing to me - it has no direct user-benefit at all. And I'm paying
the cost. So its really easy to be annoyed.

~~~
TylerE
With respect, no. If you're on a domain with any kind of google juice, your
comments will be absolutely over-run with viagra spam, fake designed purse
spam, fake investment scams, etc, etc, etc. So, there is user benefit, if you
consider having a site not vandalized to be of user benefit.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's a straw man(?). There are other ways. Use them. It isn't 'captcha or
nothing'.

~~~
TylerE
They work even worse. Been there, done that.

------
nubrigol
We need reReCaptcha. When you solve your captcha request on a website with
reReCaptcha, you're not just proving you're human; You're also helping to
provide OCR to some spam bot to allow it to solve reCaptcha.

------
Rangi42
On some sites I see numeric ReCAPTCHAS, which are easy to solve. Others,
though, have the sometimes-impossible alphabetical ones. Does the site
developer have any control over which type shows up?

~~~
varkson
Unfortunately no. Recaptcha implemented a new feature recently that uses some
sort of data to determine whether you are a bot or not. Unless it can know you
are a human, you will get the hard alphabetical ones.

There is some sort of control though, going to the Google Account creation
page will only give you easy captchas. Possibly an undocumented API or a
custom build, we can't know for sure.

------
spartanatreyu
This could be a pretty damn good captcha replacement:

[http://areyouahuman.com/demo-playthru/](http://areyouahuman.com/demo-
playthru/)

EDIT: I found their demo page.

~~~
letstryagain
Moving random objects to the right will let through about 10% of bots.
Useless.

------
BrianEnigma
A lot of captcha systems have audio fallbacks (for the legally blind). If I
can't figure out the obfuscated letters on the first try or two, I switch to
the audio.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I've tried but the audio never seems to work (with ReCAPTCHA in particular).

------
dangoldin
Are you based in the US? I use proxies every once in a while to do some
testing and notice that the captcha difficulty does vary depending where I am
"from".

------
robingarnham
Totally agree, I never get it right first time around.

------
varkson
Recaptcha is just poor, full stop.

I'm a big fan of Funcaptcha, it's much easier to solve.

[http://funcaptcha.co](http://funcaptcha.co)

~~~
letstryagain
Simply randomly rotating the objects will let through a fair number of naive
bots.

~~~
jat850
I played around with it for a while. It seems invalid attempts add another
required item to the captcha queue. So if you are trying to solve the first
one, and fail, it adds another one that the bot must attempt. I am not sure if
this helps much, but it was noteworthy.

~~~
letstryagain
Botnetters have thousands of IP addresses to attack from. They can also use
successful attempts to build a database of images used by this CAPTCHA

------
droope
not sure regarding the security of the "alternative captchas" listed here.

but that aside, I have the same problem you have, can't solve them :S which is
retarded, because they are meant to tell humans and robots apart, but
apparently "everyone is a robot" is good enough.

------
hiphopyo
Admins: Why punish all your users because of the actions of a few? Drop your
reCAPTCHA today.

