JiF's Gaming Community

So I think we can all agree that CAPTCHAs are useful for stopping bots from entering authentication systems. However, there comes a point where the efforts put into making the authentication process difficult for computers goes overboard and even legitimate humans have difficulty using the services. The CAPTCHA in this forums registration process is a good example of that, and as a friendly piece of advice, I would highly suggest the settings be altered on it to make the generated CAPTCHAs actually be readable by a human.

I literally refreshed the CAPTCHA so many times in an attempt to get one that was readable, that I was denied the ability to register and had to come back the following day to try again. Finally, on the second day I found one I could barely make out. I could only imagine if I were color blind or had extremely poor vision.

Insane...

Thanks for the feedback. I'll ask Mike to check it out. Thanks for being persistent.

Yeah that was insane!! I do remember a while back we seemed to be getting a lot of new users that were most likely not real people. So I think we made it harder,not THAT hard...but harder. We recently changed hosts so that may have inadvertently changed something with the captcha...not sure. I toned it down a lot and as long as we don't get slammed with a bunch of new registrations from bots I'll keep it this way. Thanks for letting us know and having the persistence to get through it!

No problem guys. Glad I could help.

If you do find that spam bots become a problem again, there is a plugin to ask a simple question that people have to answer, and I haven't ever had a problem with bots since installing it. You can simply do something like "What language are these forums in" and the answer could be english. Hardforum uses this method and so do my forums over at gdg.uml.edu/forums if you want an example.

Thanks for the tip. We may need it. The spam bots are restless.