Why Are Captcha's So Hard To Read?

It's IMPOSSIBLE to get used to them. You have to wonder why they are so STUPID! They will distort and run an r into an n. Is that an M? They will distort i,l,1, etc... Ok, WHAT IS IT!

And the audio is even WORSE! And it should be EASIER to implement. Just have someone saying garbage and periodically have someone say bits of what needs to be said in different tones. The person can enter what makes sense and, again, computers are HORRIBLE at doing that. Just make sure that the garbage is kind of in line with what might be there, that speakers change, and level is constant throughout. AGAIN, to throw the computer off.

The ORIGINAL idea was to destroy the ability for the average program to follow certain guidelines to determine what a character is. Possible methods?

1. SNOW
2. Confusing hashes
3. Changing colors
4. changing orientation
5. changing typefaces
6. characters out of alignment
7. numeric ties, that could be included in instructions.

It would be VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to handle all that! And GUESS WHAT! A human could read it, and NOBODY has used it to full effect. Has ANYONE thought of, for example, using portrait and landscape together? And for #7, the closest I have seen is where it may display numbers and ask you to like add them together and divide by 7. Computers are GREAT at the process but looking at two TOTALLY different formats, tying them together and parsing the language? NOPE! They have tried to do that for DECADES and apparently are STILL far off.

Steve

I don't mind "logic" captchas (ie "what is the color of grass?"), but I think that distorted image captchas should be ILLEGAL. They are definitely one of the worst ideas of all time!!

It's easy to prevent spambot submissions without using ANY type of captcha at all... and it's too bad that more people don't do this.

For example, a spambot will always fill out all form fields on a page before clicking submit. So all you have to do is create an extra, hidden form field (which human visitors will never see, but the spambot will). And name it something that looks legitimate to a spambot, like "phone number". Then just add some conditional logic in your code that blocks the submission if the hidden form is filled out.

Very simple solution... no @$%#^ captcha required!

Yeah, you're right! Computers have gotten SO smart that now they can, in a millisecond, come up with an IQ of ZERO! My first computer might have taken a second or two to get that far!

Steve