Greg Heumann
1320 posts
Oct 29, 2011
9:48 PM
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See for yourself. Here's what it said, there's what I entered, and it said "the spam prevention code you entered was incorrect." You know, Captcha is a good idea, but I notice a lot of sites have backed off to codes that are a little easier for humans to read, like numbers only, or real words. Can't we loosen our systems' grasp a little? It's not like we're trading nuclear secrets.
What is that second to last char anyway? I enter the letter O. Could it have been a zero? A Q? Or is captcha just LAME!!!?????
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/Greg
Last Edited by on Oct 29, 2011 9:49 PM
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Andrew
1451 posts
Oct 29, 2011
10:09 PM
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It's obviously a capital D. When did you last get your eyes tested, lol?
(btw, captcha is not case-sensitive.)
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Andrew.
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Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup.
Last Edited by on Oct 29, 2011 10:11 PM
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rharley5652
590 posts
Oct 29, 2011
11:57 PM
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I'm in full agreement,maybe go all #'s
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the_happy_honker
96 posts
Oct 30, 2011
12:47 AM
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Aw, fuck it, I'm with Greg.
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Andrew
1452 posts
Oct 30, 2011
1:48 AM
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...sting.
Captcha failures don't delete what you type, so that gets a big thumbs up from me!
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Andrew.
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Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup.
Last Edited by on Oct 30, 2011 1:48 AM
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tookatooka
2555 posts
Oct 30, 2011
2:29 AM
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It's not case sensitive? Thanks, now you tell me.
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Last Edited by on Oct 30, 2011 2:30 AM
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Diggsblues
1068 posts
Oct 30, 2011
3:35 AM
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I'm with you Greg. I can't tell how many times if been rejected or couldn't tell what the hell the letter was and yeah and it's not case sensitive.
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Emile "Diggs" D'Amico a Legend In His Own Mind
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eharp
1541 posts
Oct 30, 2011
4:17 AM
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and you had to spend another 5-10 seconds putting in another code?
are we that spoiled by microwaveable pop tarts?
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hvyj
1913 posts
Oct 30, 2011
6:27 AM
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Greg is right. There are 2 or 3 occasions i have spent over 10 minutes entering and re-entering the CAPTCHA code time after time only to have it rejected for no reason time after time.
These were occasions when i had spent significant time and effort putting together a post containing tab or a long explanation of a musical concept that i did not have the energy to re-write at a later time. The same thing has happened to me about a half dozen other times when i just said, F-it, and gave up trying to send the post.
This CAPTHCA stuff is a lot of nonsense. What's do they call airport security measures? Security theater? Same concept. Make people go through a lot of aggravation to deal with something that doesn't work just to make them think steps are being taken to address a problem. Just another level of institutionalized BS.
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gene
965 posts
Oct 30, 2011
6:34 AM
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If a post is going to be long, type it into yourd word program, the copy/paste it to the message box.
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hvyj
1915 posts
Oct 30, 2011
6:57 AM
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Yeah, and I'll take my belt and shoes off while I'm at it. But I'll leave any explosives in my underwear.
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pharpo
621 posts
Oct 30, 2011
7:07 AM
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And I thought I was the only one having this problem.........I am NOT crazy.....
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eharp
1543 posts
Oct 30, 2011
7:17 AM
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exactly, gene.
if i dont get the code right the first time, i copy it against the odds of it getting deleted on try number 2 or 3.
hvyj- really? over 10 minutes entering and re-entering the code?
that has to be about 50 tries! that definitely is a problem!
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sorin
334 posts
Oct 30, 2011
7:22 AM
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The Captcha has not only the role to keep the automatic bot spammers in check , but also to trim some of the light spam from forum members , you know , if the post is not that important , they not gonna take the time to renter the Captcha . Now, as you can see ,that it's not gonna work with patient spammers , like eharp .
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hvyj
1916 posts
Oct 30, 2011
7:27 AM
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I am NOT exaggerating. Obviously this doesn't happen every time. But if you have spent 15-20 minutes or more putting a detailed post together to answer somebody's technical musical question it's disappointing to have to just dump it and try to re-write it later
A couple of times i had to do just that because i was late for work and after about 25 or so tries the CAPTCHA box just went blank and stayed blank. Maybe i should have taken off my belt and shoes first.
This CAPTCHA stuff is just a lot of meaningless nonsense. We still get spammed.
EDIT: I had to enter CAPTHCHA codes FIVE TIMES to get this post accepted. First time could have been my error. But the next four, my entry was ACCURATE. One gets tired of this sort of BS.
Last Edited by on Oct 30, 2011 7:30 AM
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Greg Heumann
1321 posts
Oct 30, 2011
8:16 AM
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@sorin - the GOAL is GOOD. I'm all for stopping spammers. I see Catcha used all over the place for this purpose. But this site is the only one that uses such a random combination of letters and numbers as its captcha code. I'm simply suggesting we go to something that is less error prone for humans. Like numbers only.
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/Greg
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Jim Rumbaugh
586 posts
Oct 30, 2011
9:46 AM
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It's a ZERO, not an O, not a D. The left hand side is thicker on the lower half. It's an old school computer zero.
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theharmonicaclub.com (of Huntington, WV)
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Duane C.
18 posts
Oct 30, 2011
12:17 PM
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I hate the damn thing! Oh crap, here it is at the bottom of this message aaaahhhh!!!!!
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nacoran
4826 posts
Oct 30, 2011
12:40 PM
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I actually have an easier time with the captchas here than other sites (of course, I get lots of practice!) That said, there have been one or two times when I missed a bunch in a row. Usually right afterwards the captcha box turns into a little missing picture symbol, which suggests to me there are times when the system is in the process of crashing. My guess is that is a D. When it's getting set to crash it sometimes eats the post too. I've learned when I make a longer post to highlight it and hit copy before I hit enter on the captcha.
But, I've been on the other end of it too. Without the captcha there have been times when a single spammer gets 250 posts deep before we catch them. It once took me a couple hours to delete all the posts. Then we got hit by another spammer the same day.
It would be nice though if we could turn it off after a certain number of thumbs upped posts or something though.
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Nate
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isaacullah
1646 posts
Oct 30, 2011
2:19 PM
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I don't find the captchas all that annoying, but I knew they weren't case sensitive from the beginning. I find that mess one up maybe one time out of twenty or thirty, which IMO isn't very much. But yeah, the ones that usually mess me up are "O", "0", and "D:, or "1", "I", and "l". Sometimes, "K" and "H" are hard to distinguish too.
But I'd much rather have to do the captcha -- and mess it up once and a while -- than read all about shoes or bags or penis pills. :)
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nacoran
4828 posts
Oct 30, 2011
2:45 PM
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The other thing I've noticed is that I've solved so many of them about 90% come up on autocomplete.
(I just got a captcha with a symbol that looked very much like the one in the example, and it was, in fact, a D.)
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Nate
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Last Edited by on Oct 30, 2011 2:46 PM
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almost_random
1 post
Nov 17, 2011
10:25 AM
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Captcha is effectively dead as an idea. I make a living as a software developer, and i've already encountered lots of software that is capable either of detecting captcha, or using human-assisted services (for as low as 1$ for decoding 1000 captchas). Try googling `captcha bypass` and you'll see for yourself. Using stuff like putting a custom question, like `What year Little Walter was born in?` along with a captcha would be far more effective in stopping occasional bot.
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nacoran
4948 posts
Nov 17, 2011
1:38 PM
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Captcha's may be dead in theory, but in practice they are still pretty effective. Remember, the solutions to 1000 captchas only gets you 1000 posts, most of which, around the web, will get taken right down. I'm not sure how much that really bumps you in Google searches. I think one of the reasons forum spam is so popular is it's so insanely cheap to do.
In practice, we've seen the time it takes to catch a spammer, as measured in number of posts, fall from over a couple hundred to 10-15. That combined with hand approving people has made a huge difference. At one point it could take hours of deleting every week to keep this place moving. To make things worse, most spammers seem to assume that the best way to hide spam is to do it in old threads. That works fine on some sites, but our software puts the most recent comments on top, so it brings up threads from years ago and buries all the new stuff. (Although on the bright side it does make it pretty easy to spot spam.)
If you are spending money on captcha solutions you'll target bigger sites, at least at the current price point. MBH is a pretty big fish in the harmonica world, but in terms of the wider web we are small fry (and very diligent at deleting spam!)
That said, captchas are what this site's software supports. Most of our spammers are foreign language speakers. I imagine even a honey pot captcha would keep most of them away, and a a system where the captchas disappeared after X number of posts or after the mods approved a couple of your posts would probably do the job, but the forum software doesn't support that. :( (I'd also like the option to delete all posts by one spammer with one click, but although we've got better options than we used to, we still have to open each thread to delete the comments.
We get several spammers applying for membership every day. Some slip through. When they do post they seem to be moving at a speed suggesting they are solving the captchas themselves, at least for now. (And Wolfram Alpha solved just gave me this: Thursday, May 1, 1930.) As a side note, we get spammers from gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and tons of Chinese sites... the sites that are, at least for now, safe, seem to be ISP provided emails. Since that email is tied to the real world and payments of money, they seem to be safe, although they certainly can be hacked. What really scares me is chat bots. The day I dread is when someone figures out that the best way to spam a site is with links that the community might actually be interested in. 10 years from now you may log onto a site like this and find you are the only real person here. Everyone else will be a chat bot, putting links to buy harmonicas and blues records (and if TV ads with blues legends playing in them tell me anything, Viagra and diabetes testing equipment!) Of course, you won't know you are talking to a chat bot, and you'll enjoy the conversation, but then Morpheus will come along and pull you out of the Matrix and things will get all crazy. ;)
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Nate
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jim
1057 posts
Nov 17, 2011
11:56 PM
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This bulletin board will NEVER be able to get rid of captcha.
What if I give you the same type of forum (where you just start new threads one by one without any subforums or categories)?
- with NO captcha
- NO spam
- NO need to manually approve members
- NO need to moderate bots
The mods' task would be to select most interesting threads and move them to the main forum to appropriate categories (so those threads will not disappear under a pile or newer threads). The main "heap pile" will still have a link to those moved threads, so you can use the forum the old way and the "normal forum" way.
What do you think of that idea?
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nacoran
4952 posts
Nov 18, 2011
3:54 AM
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Sounds interesting, but Adam is pretty happy with the current software. Captcha's aside it's been pretty reliable and easy to use. Funny though, I just woke up from a dream where I was thinking about all the cool things you could do with the right widgets and doodads on a forum. I'd love to see some sort of Pandora/Spotify like integration so people could share what they are listening to easily and people could click through to buy music they hear (and give Adam a small cut).
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Nate
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jim
1058 posts
Nov 18, 2011
4:14 AM
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I'm not talking about Adam here.
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HarpNinja
1914 posts
Nov 18, 2011
6:42 AM
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Other than this forum, I only ever really post on two sites - thegearpage.net (which I hardly every post to anymore) and acapella.harmony-central.com/ (where I only check out the live performance sub group).
On both those forums, I've never seen any spamming issues and I never have to use a captcha or anything like that. Format aside, which I love at thegearpage.net, they are super easy to participate in and any mod work seems to be invisible.
The search options at thegearpage.net are great. IMO, easy access to past posts and archives is a CRITICAL part of a great forum.
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Mike
Quicksilver Custom Harmonicas
VHT Special 6 Mods
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jim
1059 posts
Nov 18, 2011
7:47 AM
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I've already offered Adam a solution to the problem, but he never replied...
Maybe the email got lost along the way, or maybe he was too busy. Or maybe he thinks it's great as it is.
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