

Show HN: The Captcha Experiment - abrichr
http://www.thecaptchaexperiment.com

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spatten
The one that said something about "type the red moving characters" never
worked for me. The spinner just sat there for > 30 seconds before I gave up.

(Chrome on OS X with Flash installed, if that makes a difference)

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blahedo
The very first one I got was:

    
    
       Chair is to wall: like 'd00r' is to "mAn" and the An$wer is; bedroom.
    

I was so flabbergasted I didn't even know where to start, and I had to move on
just to see what else was in there---the rest of the captchas all seem pretty
mundane.

Edit: found it again, fixed it to be direct quote. I'm looking at it again now
and I _still_ have no idea what I'm supposed to do with that.

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sray
Without input validation, and without any clear motivation as top why this
experiment was important, I was perfectly happy entering garbage or blank
forms.

What I'm getting at is that without any real motivation for submitting a form,
I don't really care what I enter. This is different than when I enter a
captcha "in the wild" - in that case I would try really hard because I care
about successfully submitting the form.

I'm not sure what this experiment is trying to prove, but without that
motivation, I don't believe it's a proper simulation of real captcha use.

~~~
abrichr
That's a good point. We'll have to think about how to address that.

~~~
astar
_cough_ gamification _cough_

Just kidding. You could always do a drawing. Ask for a donated ipad. everyone
who answers 100 or more catchpas correctly are eligible to be in the raffle.

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bigiain
cynical-me wonders who's signup process they're "crowdsourcing"...

~~~
abrichr
Damn, that would've been a pretty good business model. As it is, we're doing
nothing like that.

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astar
_"How many years in the Hundred Years War"_

This was my favourite one. Easy to solve -- not at all trivial to parse
mechanically.

~~~
ebzlo
Really? I don't know how many people who would know that the correct answer is
actually 116.

~~~
astar
heh. I really thought it was 100 (and so does the site because it said I was
correct).

maybe something like, "How many birthdays has a fourteen year old has?"

Or: how many inches of sandwich do you get if you get a half-foot long?

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foxylad
The recaptcha didn't have any instructions, and seemed to supply a lot of
numbers and words. Were you supposed to give a particular one?

I had little difficulty with the others, but the lack of instructions might
bias the results against recaptcha.

~~~
spydum
to be fair, I think that may be part of what they are evaluating: existing
captcha systems compared to some others. So the lack of instructions from
recaptcha is a flaw in recaptcha, not the survey

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JangoSteve
I got about 4 questions in and then it started giving me basic authentication
boxes saying the site is password protected, and I couldn't do anything or
click any links on the site without logging in or something.

~~~
abrichr
Sorry about that; I'm a developer, not a system administrator. It's fixed now.

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thekevan
I did not get the audio one at all

