Random image text generation?

skip at pobox.com skip at pobox.com
Sun Nov 12 17:47:59 EST 2006


    Steven> Keep in mind two serious problems with captchas:

    Steven> - they're impossible for the blind or people using text-only
    Steven>   browsers to see -- even mere colour blindness can make some
    Steven>   captchas impossible to solve;

    Steven> - sometimes they're too difficult for even those with perfect
    Steven>   vision to decipher.

Sure, but I'm more concerned in the immediate term with people not
submitting random crap advertising cheap drugs into my concert database.
(I've been running the Musi-Cal concert database for nearly 12 years.  This
is the first time I've ever had to consider resorting to something like
this, and it really pisses me off that I have to.)  I can deal with visual
impairment in other ways (like asking users who can't respond to the captcha
by simply emailing their concert data directly to me).

    Steven> Instead of displaying an obfuscated image of a nonsense word,
    ...

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'll keep them in mind.

Another possibility is to run the submissions through SpamBayes and silently
direct any which score as "unsure" or "spam" to me for review.  Users
wouldn't even need to know their submissions were being scrutinized.

Skip



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