Jul 13 2011

I have defeated the SN captcha!

15 responses so far

15 Responses to “I have defeated the SN captcha!”

1. # Five-manon 13 Jul 2011 at 2:54 am

   Hurray.
   Is it just me or does Ukraine flibbertigibbet sounds like a type of frog

2. # K Perryon 13 Jul 2011 at 8:09 am

   THANK YOU! I am legally blind and had to use other methods to read the thing.

3. # Nicholas Caseon 13 Jul 2011 at 9:01 am

   THANK GOD! If I had to type in one more phrase I was gonna go ape shit.

4. # Mynaon 13 Jul 2011 at 9:53 am

   Yay, thanks!

5. # Grenacon 13 Jul 2011 at 10:46 am

   Thank you so much <33333

   Also, "flibbertigibbet" sounds fun. What is it?

6. # Crystalon 13 Jul 2011 at 10:57 am

   Flibbertigibbet = somebody who is regarded as silly, irresponsible, or scatterbrained, especially one who chatters or gossips. (And yes, I looked it up.)

   Jeez, I was just starting to get used to that. Thanks for removing it, though. At one point, they were asking me to type something in Chinese!

7. # Grenacon 13 Jul 2011 at 12:20 pm

   Ha, I hate getting Captcha’s with upside down letters or with accents and stuff. My com is way too low on mem for me to have five tabs open and then have to open a word processor/another tab to find a letter with a macron or an umlaut.

   Then there’s the overlayed words that I can’t make out :I

8. # Crystalon 13 Jul 2011 at 3:38 pm

   Ugh. I only figured out a week ago that there was a button that you could click to get a new word. ‘Til then, I just had to get it wrong and try again.
   Actually, I figured out that it’ll accept letters without accents over them even if the one onscreen has them. The thing that majorly confused me was what that thing was used for in the first place…

9. # Contra Gloveon 13 Jul 2011 at 4:01 pm

   Why was the Captcha there in the first place? I assumed it was there to keep spambots out.

10. # Crystalon 13 Jul 2011 at 4:15 pm

    Yeah, it was…I accidently clicked the link the last time I was here, and, basically, it prevents spam. Also, that text that you’re typing? It’s from old documents. By typing it, you help clarify words that a computer can’t read.

11. # The ReTARDISed Whovianon 13 Jul 2011 at 6:37 pm

    Thank God, if I had to type another Captcha, I was going to go on a murderous rampage and track down the creator, when we would presumably have an enormous fight that would destroy all the scenery. Then I’d say something badass before beheading him.

12. # B. Macon 13 Jul 2011 at 6:54 pm

    “Why was the Captcha there in the first place? I assumed it was there to keep spambots out.” It was automatically activated when I updated WordPress and it took me a while to figure out how to defeat it in single combat. Captchas are usually used to keep out spambots, but that has not been an issue on SN because my anti-spam plug-in (Akismet) is totally dynamite. SN has had about 22,000 real comments and about 130,000 spam comments. Of those 130,000 comments, only 10 were ever visible to readers because Akismet preemptively blocked them. So, on average, I’ve only had to personally delete ~3 spam comments per year.
    
    …
    
    Like Whovian noted, a secondary purpose behind this particular captcha is that it helps book-scanners double-check that their books are reading correctly. For example, sometimes scanners will mix up similar-looking words like “clown” and “down.” If the book-scanning software thinks that the word is “clown” but most human captcha users report that the word looks more like “down,” the people running the book-scanning program can double-check the relevant sentence and correct it manually.

13. # Contra Gloveon 13 Jul 2011 at 7:20 pm

    Oh, I see. It all makes sense now.

    Also, remember that Polish-language post from way back? How did that happen?

14. # B. Macon 13 Jul 2011 at 8:33 pm

    My guess is that they were able to guess an administrator’s password. I changed my password to a ~40-character string and it hasn’t happened since.

15. # Torion 16 Jul 2011 at 11:49 am

    TAHNK YOU!!!

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