CAPTCHA Strength - What the hell

[DeMoB]

I've seen some bad captcha's as of late, but this site's takes the biscuit.

It took me 3 goes to register (with refreshing the captcha image a few times on each go), and my monitor is calibrated and I have decent vision.

You are putting off a lot of potential new members by using such a ridiculously strong version. Does the current system keep out 100% of spam? As if not, it's purpose is flawed and you are just winding up people that might otherwise sign up and post.

There are better systems (http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth) of keeping out spambots than ridiculously hard CAPTCHA's. All you really need is one that isn't a vBulletin standard one.

Sorry for a rant being my first post, but I had to let you know what it's like from the outside.

Dan

[tommykjensen]

No system to prevent spam is 100% but the current does a good job and the moderators does the rest.

Welcome to the forum.

[Pete]

A few refreshes will often result in an image that's easier to read than the others.

I recently performed a dummy registration to test this out and managed to get a legible representation on the third refresh.

We get many new members each day and very few of them complain about the Captchya images. We're aware that the strength may be higher than some other sites, but we manage an effective compromise between allowing members to join and preventing spammers and automated bots.

[tim]

Try the hotmail captcha, that one's a killer!

[Anke]

Don't let it put you off, everything's fabulous from here on in :)

Welcome to POTN :)

[susieT]

It took me longer than it did you to read it properly, plus for the fun of it the user name I wanted was taken! Think I may need my eyes tested :lol:

[::John::]

Welcome

Now that you have passed the first and only test, relax and enjoy!

[makaka]

yeah i was seating and trying 100xxx time until i get the right combination to register .
Maybe the moderator could add another CAPTCHA and make them easier to read

[Pekka]

Blame better OCR algorithms for all this. Robots can read quite well these days so we need to keep it harder to make sure you're human. And because you complained about it we now definitely know you're human :)