Humble Requests
Hello all. Bloggers, I understand that it's the holiday season and everyone is stressed out. But please, as you prepare your festivities, remember blogsNH. I'd appreciate any new posts -- especially from folks who haven't written recently. We should also have some new bloggers joining the community soon, and I am looking to do some cleanup of our archives. As always, if you want to contribute, send me an e-mail. Take care.
Captchas are for spam
Captchas are for spam prevention.
One of the problems that most sites that offer user participation (like blogs and message boards) face is the fact that spammers have developed ways to post comments on them, thus deterrents are needed to prevent that from happening.
Captcha is one such method, the idea is that since a computer can't read what's printed in an image, they can't fill out the form. The main drawback of captcha is accessibility, if you're blind and a site hasn't provided an alternate way of commenting for you, you can't post.
The problems on blogsNH regarding captcha, I believe, has something to do with some Drupal 4.7 captcha module bugs.
The CAPTCHA Issue
(First I should apologize for the OT comment, this was intended as a 'reply' to Michael Evans' comment, and an opportunity to further a good cause.):
Oh those wonderfully annoying CAPTCHAs how they challenge my patience!
I've noticed three issues when leaving comments here:
1. Many times I can't determine if a letter is supposed to be uppercase or lowercase.If the CAPTCHA solution is 'case neutral' that fact should be stated to avoid any confusion.
2. The last letter or number sometimes runs off the edge of the CAPTCHA image and you're forced to guess what it is.
3. I haven't left enough comments to see if there is a definite pattern, but it seems like it takes two tries to have your CAPTCHA accepted. The last time I left a comment I was certain that what I entered into the CAPTCHA field was correct but it was rejected.
I'm not familiar enough yet with the process to know if different browsers are more or less susceptible to these issues, but in all too many instances that is the case.
- Aside from all that, I'd like to suggest to the Monitor that you could help a good cause and prevent comment SPAM at the same time. There is a project called "reCAPTCHA" that "[...] does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into 'reading' books".
Here's how they describe it on the reCAPTCHA site:
[...] "To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.[...]"
The project is run by Carnegie Mellon University, has numerous ways (and assistance) to implement it on your web site, and is easier (and less annoying?) for users.
Here is the URL for the reCAPTCHA [FAQ] page: <http://recaptcha.net/faq.html>
Perhaps Nicole has heard about it, and possibly some firsthand or anecdotal experience regarding its implementation.
Personally I think it's a creative solution and an excellent cause. I hope it's given serious consideration by the Concord Monitor Online staff.
Now I'll submit this comment and see how the CAPTCHA process works this time..
[UPDATE: First try A-OK, no problems whatsoever!]
Hi Clay,
What purpose does the Captcha Validation serve other than to annoy?
Thanks,
Michael Evans