I'm using straight up Blogger from Google. No add-ons. Nothing fancy. I thought the only effect I could have on Captcha was either to turn it on or turn it off. After swapping a couple of chats with experts on their forums, I've found I can't even turn it off. It's effectively hard wired on.
According to the webpages they referred me to there's no way for me to affect anything. I was briefly hopeful I could return to the type 1 Captcha puzzles because those always seemed easy, while with the pictures, I find I mess up often without knowing why.
(what they call reCAPTCHA V1)
Unfortunately, I don't see that it's even possible to revert to V1. Their website is stressing a V3 that is supposed to be easier on humans but better at blocking bots. Users won't do anything - they'll just use the site and V3 will block the spots.
Does Captcha do anything worthwhile? Couldn't prove it by me. I got half a dozen Spam comments today that were all to very old pieces (one was from 2010) and they clearly not were not written by English speakers. I have no idea what Captcha does besides annoy people because those comments were only stopped by my setting to moderate comments on posts more than 14 days old.
The Google community folks didn't recognize a way in which my Captcha tests could be harder than any other sites' tests.
Although I tried to turn it off, I can't even do that. I'm stuck.
I think it is being used as a tool to force people to convert to a google username account. Same thing with the "you can only edit your comment if you use google account" The difficulty varies widely, and some that I know I have answered correctly run through a dozen different pictures before accepting a comment. And some are a one shot easy deal. We will see how this one goes...OK- first try, one picture set, 11 clicks, and a "please try again" second try--5 picture sets, all answered correctly, "please try again". third try, 1 picture set, five clicks to get rid of the store fronts, "please try again"- this is why I rarely comment here anymore. Fourth try-one picture set, fire hydrants, all clicked, "please try again".
ReplyDeleteand several more, I stopped going back to edit them. This is killing non google account comments. They probably want some info for the data banks- this was cars- I clicked all of them, "please try again". #2-
DeleteI am getting tired of this but will go till it posts with no more going back to tell you how many tries it took.
Can't comment on captcha on your site, as it is happy to see my goggle connection. Other than eating the occassional comment, no problem.
ReplyDeleteHowever, not so much over at Kevin's Smallest Minority. Disgust is the word for Discus. It doesn't care for Google, it wnats a Resume to continue to use it. So, I tried Catpcha. Keeps saying I'm successful, but never activates the button to continue to post the comment. No email to advise Kevin of the problem. I guess I'm down to read only. Couple other blogs have given me similar problems lately. Well, basically since the EU went all privacy policy on everyone. I think that was the cause.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteAnd that comment right there " removed by a blog administrator" is what's wrong with captcha. Maybe it catches bots, I can clearly only see the ones that get by, but it doesn't stop spammers.
DeleteI have three browsers here that I use to see how stuff looks. Firefox (this one), Chrome and IE. I stay logged into my blog account on this one and tried the other. On Chrome the experience was like Raven's. Mine was "click the squares with a crosswalk" and took four or five trips through to finally get its approval.
I suppose you could try a different blogging platform. Personally, I think they purposefully make it difficult so that users will get a google account and log in that way.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't trust anything Google told me about anything they were doing.
Thanks for trying.
15 frames to make that comment. Try Wordpress, $8/month, no crap.
ReplyDeleteThanks for trying.
I sort of agree with Raven. I think it's a ploy by Google to get users to opt for a Google account in order to get more data on users and to capture comments so that they can be more easily turned over to a three letter agency should one ask. Never underestimate the dark lords that control the intertubes.
ReplyDeleteI'm not paranoid because I think there's a spook behind every web page, I'm paranoid because there IS a spook behind every page.
Nemo
while with the pictures, I find I mess up often without knowing why
ReplyDeleteThat's my experience, and it only happens here. My assumption has long been that it's a cheat by captcha to get a second or sometimes third unit of image processing work out of me.
The Google community folks didn't [ADMIT] a way in which your Captcha tests could be harder than any other sites' tests. We already know there has to be a big database which records which image tiles are what object. Where does this image classification data come from? I speculate from the operation of captchas. Which means the tile classifications are floating point with an uncertainty, and updates are Bayesian. Which means the quality of captcha-operation updates to those classifications should be scaled depending on the track record of the blog site, and on the IP address and supercookies of the individual commenters when that's meaningful. You're a senior ham, and you have a bunch of i-dotting and t-crossing senior ham readers. If you were blogspot, who else would you trust to classify your images? My assumption is, you can't turn captcha off because harvesting image classification work is part of the cost you're paying for this blogging service. Captcha being used would prove to advertisers that a human is looking at their ads, that the web browser isn't playing to an empty room.
Elsewhere, I've heard that Nigerian spams are written in such bad English because that separates out people who are never going to send money. It may be that presenting and thus reinforcing keywords in a digestible sentence fragment is sufficient to get most of the advertising/propaganda/mindshare result. Trump bad. Green New Deal good. Sea level rise from Climate Change. Ten years to save the planet.
Ya know, there's there's the coupon code sharing web site trick. Millions of commenters could get one google account, and share it. I believe the traditional username and password are cypherpunks/writecode.
Today I have to add the NRA's Shooting Illustrated site to the growing list of those I can't comment at. Disqus totally sucks.
ReplyDeleteAh, well, I need to spend less time on the computer. I just didn't expect an outside agent to engineer it!