Re: [PHP] ASCII Captcha

At 5:06 PM +0100 8/29/08, Stut wrote:
On 29 Aug 2008, at 16:33, tedd wrote:
I didn't mean to imply laziness, but now that you mentioned it -- on one hand we say that CAPTCHA is good enough until something else comes along, but on the other hand, because we are using CAPTCHA, there's no need to develop something else.

I think this is very naive and coming from you tedd it surprises me.

From my perspective, I think it naive to look at this in any other way.

For example, how much time have you invested in finding a better way? I'm not pointing a finger at you and saying "You need to drop everything and come up with a solution before moving on." But I am saying that you are using a CAPTCHA until someone else comes up with a better way. Is that not true?

So, in essence my statement above is not naive but rather factual. Factual is not naive.


Very few developers have time to put everything on hold because the tools they have are not 100% effective - I certainly don't. I really wish I did, but this is the real world where the almighty pound is king. I'd love to see the faces at the next board meeting when I say "no progress this month because we've been trying to come up with something better than CAPTCHA's".

You are missing the point. I'm not telling you to stop anything.

I am saying -- however -- that we continue (myself included) to use technology that hurts others. That does not justify our actions -- it only provides an excuse.


The best defence against dodgy inputs I've seen so far has been having a good community on the site who pro-actively look for and take action against it. Best example I can think of this late in the day is Wikipedia.

As I see it, I could be wrong, but that's just an example of "developers" who are not taking the easy way out, but rather trying to solve the problem by using something other than CAPTCHA, like the ones I posted earlier.

Look, we are not in disagreement -- I understand that you have deadlines and projects that can't be put on hold and all the other excuses you cite -- actually, so do I. But in the end, we are doing this at the cost of accessibility for others. We shouldn't lose sight of that.

Cheers,

tedd

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