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Worst captcha eva

Filed under UI on 13th Nov -07

captcha

Got this captcha on Shozu. At first I thought it was an IQ test, which I’m glad it wasn’t because it took me two attempts.

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Discussion

There are 6 comments battling for the truth! Have your say!

  1. Wow. I’ve never seen one like that before.

    If you’re even remotely interested in captchas you should check out Luis von Ahn’s excellent Google TechTalk on “Human Computation”
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

    In the first 10 minutes, he explains (among other things) how spammers get people to solve captchas for them. He also has some worrying statistics on Solitaire, and a very cunning plan to label every image on the web.

    Words by Stewart Greenhill on November 13, 2007 at 10:35 pm | #

  2. Ha that’s awesome! That’d be enough to abandon the entire application and look for something else. Hello - there are LEGITIMATE users out there; don’t make them jump through a billion fire-ringed hoops just to keep out the few bad eggs.

    Words by NathanaelB on November 15, 2007 at 9:27 am | #

  3. Hi there,
    It’s interesting hearing all the feedback on the web about our captcha :-)

    We put a lot of thought into this design after a denial of service attack saw our premium SMS gateway abused after our old standard looking captcha was compromised. So in an effort to keep the service running smoothly for our loyal users one of our server engineers came up with this design and it’s worked a charm.

    I can understand your concerns though, and we are conducting research about any adverse effects it has on our sign up rate so we can weigh up our options. It’s not as complex as it may first appear, it’s just different really. We’ve also taken other things into consideration with the design, such as being friendly to color blind users for example.

    Thanks again for your feedback.

    Best,
    Jambo (ShoZu)

    Words by Mark Jambas on November 20, 2007 at 7:03 am | #

  4. Hi Jambo,

    Thanks for taking the time to leave your comment. I’d be interested to know in your research results about whether people are continuing with sign ups for Shozu once they come across the captcha.

    I can understand your security concerns, but if you feel this is the best option could I suggest some images that look a bit better visually. To look at the capture now it is really hard to decipher. The four blue symbols stand out and make looking at the actual letters very hard.

    Shozu is an awesome application BTW!

    Words by Bronwen on November 20, 2007 at 9:17 am | #

  5. Agree the letters are hard to read.

    We are going to see a lot more captchas like this in the future. The standard ones just aren’t generally effective with large scale attacks.

    Words by Gary Barber on November 20, 2007 at 9:29 am | #

  6. I think we’ll start to see captchas like:

    “What is two oranges plus 4 oranges with the first letter of the last name of the current President of the USA before the fruit”

    :-)

    Words by NathanaelB on November 20, 2007 at 9:44 am | #

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