Ads Captcha

The recent Stanford University study that showed the difficulties caused by text based captcha to human beings who aim to decipher it, had expectedly pushed forward image based captcha developers.

Thus, Confident Technologies has released its image based captcha plugin for Wordpress, stating that product is “easy on people while being tough on bots” as opposed to the frustrating, site abandoning encourager text based captcha. Confident Captcha displays a number of images, organized in a grid, asking the user to prove his humanness by clicking on one of the presented images. Users can choose the number of images and the background color to avoid the common side effect of image based captcha, its being the center of attention.

Just released on June 23, the Confidential Captcha was downloaded only by two dozens of users (as for the moment of writing); Still, looking at some of the most popular text-based captcha plugins for Wordpress, you hardly notice a meaningful drop in the number of downloads a day, nor a huge increase in the number of image-based captcha downloads. So,difficult or not, most Wordpress users may be still hung on the good old “type the two words” captcha.

According to a recent study made by a group of researchers from Stanford, when comparing humans to robots – humans don’t do too well in deciphering captcha tests.

The group took more than 300,000 captchas, all are examples taken from popular web companies such as Yahoo! and Google, and gave them to humans (native English speakers) to solve.
When the same captcha was given to three different human subjects, only 71% of the time they had agreed on the right answer.

If to be more specific, Study participants succeeded in solving Google’s and Yahoo!’s CAPTCHAs only 87% of the time, while the ones used by Microsoft were solved correctly only 80% of the time. In audio captcha testing (made for the blind) the results were even worth, as recognition was found to be “as low as 39% for Microsoft and 35% in Google’s case”.

These results support the saying that Captchas – originally designed to keep bots out of all kinds of online platforms and thus prevent spam – are sometime too hard not only for robots but also for humans to decipher.

This is a list of online resources that have posts about “captcha of the day”, something I personally really like. Lot’s of meaningless captchas, funny ones and others that will make you smile…
My captcha won’t allow me to have sex
Crazzzzzzzy captchas
WTF captcha
Not very sensitive captcha
Hideous week captcha
Shit captcha
IRS captcha
Political captcha
Why yes you are, captcha
Very nice Captcha scripts collection
Facebook captcha got wrong

Ran into some funny or amusing captcha you feel like sharing with the world?
write it down at the comments section and we’ll add it to our list