Wednesday, August 08, 2012

CAPTCHA has failed, and so anonymous comments may go too.

My most loyal commenter (that's you Martin) tells me he can't solve Google's CAPTCHAs any more.

Neither can I. I responded ...
I can't do the CAPTCHAs either. Blog authors don't usually see them, but occasionally I'm connecting with a non-owner account.

I think they've evolved to a point that only human experts and AIs can solve them, and they all work for spammers.

Problem is I allow anonymous comments and only moderate if > 4 days, so there's only CAPTCHA and Google spam detection between me and endless hordes of mosquitoes.

As an experiment I've disabled CAPTCHAs on notes.kateva.org. I'll see how good Google's spam detection is. If the volume is too high I'll turn off anonymous comments. I agree, CAPTCHA has reached the end of the road.
Even in tiny market blogs like mine, comment and discussion is problematic.

Update 8/9/12: No problems! I should have dumped CAPTCHA years ago. Turns out I did on tech.kateva.org and then forgot I had. Google's comment spam filters are pretty amazing.
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4 comments:

  1. chrismealy8/8/12, 2:33 PM

    Thanks. I can't solve them anymore either.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Greg Sanders8/8/12, 2:48 PM

    I've longed worried that if it comes to a human-robot wars I'll be shot as a traitor for failing a CAPTCHA at some point. Kind of like an American soldier in a WWII film that can't actually remember who won the last World Series or the like.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JGF8/8/12, 8:52 PM

    So far no deluge of spam. I'm going to try turning them off for tech.kateva.org.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JGF8/8/12, 8:54 PM

    I'll be !! I didn't have captchas on tech.kateva.org.

    Sh*t. I should have turned them off long ago. Looks like Google's comment spam filtering is incredible. (they stopped giving me a count on comment spam after it passed 1000, probably tens of thousands now.)

    ReplyDelete