This song is dedicated to members who have been caught by the dreaded Captcha code. I have been caught maybe 1 or 2 00 times Grrrr. I feel your pain! I have hammed this vid up with low voice and crunchy harp : )
Truth to be told I have less problems these days since I realised the letters are not case sensitive and so I just type lower case. The biggest cause of a failed post is that the captcha code that appears when you start typing your post has a timeout so if you take a while to complete your post your post will be rejected even if you type the captcha out correctly. For this reason I always copy my post and paste it in for a second go.
I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the Forum Captcha blues. I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the Captcha Caught’ya blues. Is that an L or a 2, d’ya know I haven’t got a clue.
Well I was wrong, O baby was I wrong. Well I was wrong, I should’ve known it all along. It’s so unfair, my post has vanished in thin air.
Must get it right, this time I’ll get it right. Don’t get uptight, put up some kind of a fight, Darn in my haste, I forgot to copy paste.
argh.. Argh… And now you are saying that the letters are not case sensitive. I have lost many texts just thinking is it w or W; c or C etc. because the size of the letter in the code tell you noting. Maybe 10 first messages I lost because my writing in English is very slow. Now I write these –like this one- on separate Word document then I copy this and paste to messagefield in forum. Then the problem is that because I don’t know the row lenght my texts looks ridigulous on forum, one or two words on one row then a very long row and so on. Look at my post Eleanore Rigby & PowerPender+ tuning (Mar 22). So your Form Blues describes my feelings perfcly when I start to write something to this site. And Kieron, you have second reason to see my Eleanore Rigby video but watch it in YouTube by klicking YouTube sign at righthand bottom corner so you can see the text I added to the video there. I have tried to send an e-mail to you but maybe the adress I found in your profile here is not valid, mara
Lol... I've solved so many of these at this point my captcha solving is frequently auto-completed!
Maraboy, no, it's not case sensitive. :)
We also don't have a visual impairment captcha option, which I've complained to the site hosts about. Personally, I wish it could turn off after a set number of posts or that admins could have a tick box on posts that we could click to disable it for members once we are sure they aren't spam bots.
If i've taken a bit long on a post i just enter a single letter into the box which is refused and then a new captcha pops up which if you answer immediately is always accepted.
Not always I've gone thru 5 before, if you do forget to save before sending there is something else that can be done, when the post fails to go through, just left click the back arrow then clear out the first captcha and enter the new one.
Oh and by the way Grey Owl, nice, it's about time someone wrote a song about this.
Indigo, yeah, it times out after 15 minutes. When they first implemented that it was 5, but we complained and got it stretched a bit. It's particularly annoying if you browse the forum with browser tabs.
Flbl, yeah, that works most of the time now. Sometimes there is a hiccup on the server end and you still lose the post but it happens a lot less than it used to. If I have a particularly long post I just control+c it so I have it ready to re-paste if it eats it.
Love the song! Nacoran has a good point. As a blind guy I hate captcha’s. Having no audio option doesn’t help much. I wonder how much a captcha really does keep out bots? Love this forum though.
Last Edited by wrm2012 on Apr 14, 2018 5:25 PM
Since I get wordy sometimes, I have lost posts to the ether. Most times I remember to save and if it goes away I can replace the text and put in the new code. ----------
wrm2012, the captcha does almost nothing. It's possible some spammers see the captcha and decide to not even bother posting but we get only a hand full of spam posts a year at this point. Part of that is that our server hosts block several countries from posting (China, Russia) where spam tends to originate, which is overkill because it means people from those places can't even see the site, let alone post, unless they know the site is there and then contact us to get whitelisted or use a tor browser. Part of it is that we hand approve memberships, although it's rare that we don't approve someone. And actually a few years back they updated our spam deletion tools and made some other general improvements. We can delete as many posts on a thread as we want all at once, which stops the spammer who throws 20 comments on one post and they improved the response time of the member list. It used to take 15 minutes to load a page, and you had to search through dozens and dozens (hundreds) of pages alphabetically to find the member, each 'guess' taking another 15 minutes or so... when I was a kid I used to have a toy called Dataman. It was like a calculator but it had some games on it. One involved guessing a number 1-100. The ideal strategy was to guess 50, then it would tell you if it was higher or lower. Say it was higher, then you'd guess 75... you'd keep doing it until you'd narrow down and find the number. We still basically have to play that game with finding a member name. It's alphabetically, but I'd bet it takes 5-6 guesses to narrow it down to the right one since the numbers don't correspond directly to the letters. Now it takes a few seconds per page compared to the 15 minutes it used to.
Even if the captchas turned off after you're 100th post or something... that would slow spammers down enough to keep them from doing much damage but would stop being a problem for regulars pretty quickly.
Hahaha, this is gold, Owl - great! :D I don't get why people have problems with this to be honest. I never forget to just copy my post so I can insert it if the captcha fails and it takes 1 second. The fact that the dreaded captcha inspired you come up with this song is hilarious though, so I guess it's good for something.
@narcoran The main Captcha problem is that the code changes roughly every 10 minutes, so by the time you finish writing a post, the code has changed and your post is rejected. But does it have to change that often - wouldn't once a day be sufficient to deter spam bots?
