For a lot of people, they want to run a service and not have to spend a significant amount of time and energy investing in anti-abuse. In general anti-abuse work is not nearly as useful as product work, a day off, or a variety of other things.
I agree, there should be better ways to do anti-abuse. Yet I find myself coming up empty when I try to find better options for the common scenario where people would really rather invest deeply in their service than in anti-abuse.
I would love to hear some ideas about how to solve this nasty general problem while also respecting user time and privacy. Unfortunately, I've found that entirely too often the vague sense that there must be a better way fails to translate into substantive better way.
Better way? I'd be hard pushed to come up with a worse way.
The number of things that are "wrong" with reCatcha etc, have been mentioned on here ad nauseam. In fact, I'll quote myself from another debate on the subject, a while back:
>1: It's never made clear exactly what you're supposed to click on. For example. If I'm told to click on "traffic lights" does that mean just the lights?... or the poles as well?... and what about a square that only has a tiny bit in it? Does that count too, or is it only squares which are mostly filled by the object in question?
>2: They make no concession to non-US English speakers. I've been asked to identify things before, where I had to guess what the word means because the same thing is called something completely different in UK English.
>The only thing that approaches the level of rage that reCaptchas instil in me are those captchas where you've got to transcribe what's in a photo of some letters & numbers and where they NEVER fecking tell you whether it's case sensitive or not, or where they use identical characters for zero and letter O, one and letter I, etc.
I agree, there should be better ways to do anti-abuse. Yet I find myself coming up empty when I try to find better options for the common scenario where people would really rather invest deeply in their service than in anti-abuse.
I would love to hear some ideas about how to solve this nasty general problem while also respecting user time and privacy. Unfortunately, I've found that entirely too often the vague sense that there must be a better way fails to translate into substantive better way.