Suggestion: everybody rightly despises google captcha. You have it set to a very high level of difficulty, with lots of dim grainy photos. You're losing new members that way. I would have just turned around and left but I have an urgent question. Let's hope I don't next encounter the "1st question must be moderated, so wait a few days".

Sounds like a bot trolling ...

Just kidding. You will be welcomed, but yes this one (and all future) will be subject to moderation by jeremy and his lackies - er, mods ...
Go ahead and ask anyway.

1 members found this post helpful.

I totally agree with you! This morning I tried to enter this forum; so filled in everything including the 'V' in captcha, but nothing happened. After three more tries, I suddenly received a few emails noticing that my new name Johannisdejonge was already in use??? Then another email told me that I got a new password!!! And finally that new password worked, without any more captchas at all. I entered the forum without any more problems and asked my questions... but in the meantime I received the next email telling mo that I am accepted but still have to ask my first question, just like you. Now I'm back to this forum and trying to formulate the same rather technicial question AGAIN. Sigh...

1 members found this post helpful.

I despise captcha and also find it difficult to "process". The little rectangles with a mixture of upper and lower case letters of different colours and fonts with various lines and dashes, interspersed and overlaid, are particularly obnoxious. I'm assuming that's what LQ uses? The trouble is that there are bots which can defeat it unless it's very strict.

1 members found this post helpful.

The most simple captcha imho is still: ask a human question! Eg five minus three equals (answer). But who am I lol.

1 members found this post helpful.

The principle is plain wrong, make life hard for honest people because someone somewhere is dishonest. Unfortunately this principle is spreading in our society.

4 members found this post helpful.

Indeed - just look at the inane password "rules" we have to obey. Pity cracking algorithms don't suffer from the same foibles as carbon-based life-forms. But site admins (including this one) continue to be entranced by such stupidities.

</rant>

2 members found this post helpful.

Yes, but the point remains as stated: many sites won't let the 1st post through without being approved by a moderator, and very often that doesn't happen for days. (This site did not turn out that way, thank goodness.)

I addition, notice that most often the pictures are of traffic, whether signs or crosswalks or buses or whatever. That's because google is forcing people to train their self-driving AI by labeling images. Otherwise, google would have to pay people to do that. On other sites, more updated, the photos are now of boats. So I looked to see if googe wants to make money from self driving boats, and yes they do.

I came back to this thread having just experienced another site using the same cranked-up-difficulty captcha. I refused to complete it and will never go back there.

Yep, Alpine Linux uses an alternative that does it something like this: three hundred ninety eight million five hundred sixty four thousand... Now type in the 8th digit from the right.

Simple but effective, and if spammers do the effort to write code to solve that, you just switch to something similar but different. Using language, as you way. AI is still terrible at natural language.

Likewise, there are alternatives to google anaytics.

Did you already try to solve this "easy" captcha? What the heck should be the eighth character from the right? Obviously you first have to write down the whole thing on a piece of paper before you will be able to count back to the requested digit...
Sigh... that's just even more trouble, and for what...
Just my 2 euros

SOLVED

You really think that's difficult?

"you first have to write down the whole thing on a piece of paper"
You must be kidding, right? Paper? When you are already on a computer?

Of course I'm talking metaphorically, perhaps speaking about someone that's less handy with a computer than you are. LOL
Besides, I'm Dutch, being born and still living in The Netherlands; and that's also my native language. Go figure...

goedenmiddag

The captcha question should be "Which of the following are spam posts: [a list of several posts including spam ones]".

1 members found this post helpful.