Ask HN: User friendly Captcha systems for mobile apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: User friendly Captcha systems for mobile apps?

14 pointsyonilevy16 comments

Hi, I'm looking for a captcha solution that is as user-friendly as possible for a mobile app. Couldn't find anything interesting.

Do you know of such a framework / are you working on one? With the many sensors available i'm sure there could be interesting, user friendly ways to make life harder for bots.

It seems like the common alternative is to send a validation text message (makes it harder to spam), but that doesn't seem optimal from a UX perspective. Would love to hear ideas from that direction as well though.

Thanks!

View on HN

The best captcha system is no captcha system at all. You might take a look at the Wordpress plugin 'WP Bruiser', which is extremely effective at eliminating bot submissions, without any user interaction at all.

Google's "Select all the pictures that are of flowers" seems like it would be well-suited for mobile.

That's a pretty good solution, but I can't find a way to ask Google for that specific challenge (it seems to be bundled with other challenges that are web-oriented). Is there a way to do that?

I'm not sure, I've never used it :/

I think it auto-detects mobile, I've never gotten one that wasn't click-the-flowers.

I always get the one that is like "select all of the storefronts" and I screw it up consistently. I end up having to go through like 20 pictures before I'm verified because I choose things that look, to me, like storefronts but, apparently, aren't?

All the while feeling as if you are part of a massive unpaid labour force training Google's optical recognition algorithms and adding and verifying Google Streetview metadata (e.g., “select all images containing street signs/store fronts/lakes”).

Oh we definitely are. Best way to get this kind of information into a database is by socially engineered human map-reduce.

What about implementing something in the likes of https://github.com/josscrowcroft/MotionCAPTCHA ? I think this would be user-friendly for mobile users.

On mobile is it necessary. I guess its most dependent on what you're trying to accomplish. On mobile you have access to a unique id like device id or other identifiers that are specific to a device.

But how do you know it's not just a random string?

I think it depends on what you are trying to accomplish with the use of the captcha.

Validation text messages can be useful and as long as you think about the message (Ie. I can pull the notification banner down and see the numbers rather than have to exit the application I am in), it shouldn't impact the process too much.

On Android you can even read the message yourself. It seems iOS can do this too but for now it seems on Apple can read verification messages.

Can you use reCAPTCHA? Nothing easier than just ticking checkbox "I'm not a robot".

As far as I know that check-box works by analysing the mouse movement when you check it. I don't think that would work on a touch screen.

This may fall outside of what you're trying to do, but I always thought the best form captcha would be to extend Uber to do real human to human verification.

You send a request to a driver, the driver shows up and confirms the person applying, completing or w/e is actually a person.

This can have potential legal/government related application.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com