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>Besides this -- the article makes no attempt to offer a better solution.

That's completely irrelevant. Criticism is not about solving the problem. It's about pointing out that the current solution is inadequate.

Most movie critics never wrote, directed, or acted in movies. It doesn't invalidate their criticism.

In fact, your criticism of the other poster's criticism doesn't offer a better solution than criticism either. You simply criticize that post. (And that's OK, if ironic.)

Absolutely.

I hate with a passion the attitude of "Don't bring me problems. Bring me solutions". Sure, if you've got a solution as well, that's great. But I'd much rather know there's a problem that you don't have a solution to than be completely ignorant of it.

I go even a bit further: don't bring me solutions, just tell me what makes your life difficult.

As a tools developer, I observe that user-provided solutions almost never address anything outside their specific problem, which is potentially only one of many things the feature with the issue is designed to address.

Some of my colleagues tend to point to user feedback as gospel, including the ways suggested to "fix" the issue. But those fixes are often myopic and laden with technical debt.

But I will never disbelieve a claim that something is confusing, or hard to use (almost never, anyway; some people are idiots). Just don't be offended if I don't fix it in the way you came up with.

>That's completely irrelevant. Criticism is not about solving the problem. It's about pointing out that the current solution is inadequate.

Well it's a pointless criticism when everyone knows CAPTCHAs suck. People have spent a lot of time working on them trying to find better ones that work consistently at scale and have failed.

It's similar to someone now writing a criticism on the testing procedures at the Chernobyl nuclear power plan.

"Captcha's are not going anywhere anytime soon."

Its turning in to the new version of "3rd world outsourced phone support" A strong indicator the user simply doesn't care about the customer experience.

For some industries / companies, this is perfectly OK and BAU. For others it can be a company-killer.

I see a captcha and I know the company doesn't like me, doesn't like what I'm doing, and doesn't care if I know how they feel about me. And for some situations that's perfectly OK. Certainly not all.

In the past month the reCAPTCHA challenges I have encountered have been like the article. I just have to hit reload until I can get something remotely readable or I managed to guess the letters correctly.

This is exactly my experience too. I find myself having to hit reload increasingly to get something readable.

That's been my experience too, I thought I was just getting old.

> Captcha's are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Which is truly unfortunate, as they're a fucking abomination, an embarrassment to the IT industry in general.

Try solving these actual examples:

https://i.groupme.com/311x122.png.48e978e0def70131a42422000b...

https://i.groupme.com/495x276.png.4da125f0def70131a42422000b...

湘悪 rhaval

fgsfds onsupsel

I don't quite see why people assume recaptchas are real words, they haven't been for a really long time. The control is always a made-up word and almost always solvable. If you can't solve the other one, enter whatever.

> Try solving these actual examples:

First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel

You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).

How the hell is anyone "to realize that only one word needs to be entered" when that's not what the instructions say to do?

Same reason 4chan reCaptcha is no longer used to digitize the other word. If they had their way the correct answer to all reCaptchas would eventually become "nigger nigger"[1].

Fun times.

[1] the idea was to always write the correct word and just enter "nigger" as the other word. This eventually led to reCaptcha disregarding 4chan answers from the pool of resolving weird words.

You aren't supposed to realize it or do it. Google uses the human's work on solving the unknown word to either get street numbers from photos or digitize books.

However, the whole point of them having the humans do that work is /they do not know the correct answer/. Since they do not know the correct answer they cannot be basing the test of the CAPTCHA on it. From there it is not a big leap to surmise that you are only actually being tested on the word that actually looks distorted on purpose.

Either you just know because internet or you get it from trial and error.

It's probably written on recaptcha website or wikipedia article, but basically you get presented one word that machine can't read (the distorted letters) and something out of a book that google had digitized and uses you to ocr it. You also get a lot of address numbers for google street view.

Just input the distorted word and type anything for the other, and it will work. Of course the instructions won't tell you that or else people would act accordingly and google would lose this free labor source for the tedious work of proofreading digitized version of books.

You don't have to preemptively realize it. You just have to try it. Like he said, literally anything you type for the unrecognizable word will work.

Experience with reCaptcha.

I can totally understand why those would frustrate non-technical users, but on a site like HN I would expect people to know how reCaptcha works.

That said I think reCaptcha has been getting much harder recently due to the arms race with bots. I now sometimes fail 3-4 times in a row.

>I would expect people to know how reCaptcha works.

Why should you even expect that? Recaptcha was interesting in 2006, but anyone not following the news around that time or around the its acquisition by Google might not have learned this.

If most other people entered the same thing then the word gets into the database, and your guess may not pass muster. So the question is - what percentage of users should be able to get the captcha before the answer is set?

> Captcha's are not going anywhere anytime soon.

You're probably right. But the fact remains that captchas aren't good enough. They can be partially automated; blackhats can use captcha solving farms which will be at least as accurate as the average human (probably more accurate, I imagine).

A better solution might employ heuristics similar to DDoS mitigation techniques. I really don't know, but there is a need for something better here.

"I've solved a lot of captcha's in my time, and really have never experienced the trouble the author is detailing."

That might be the problem right here. Try browsing with Tor or passing through an anonymizing proxy. The more you solve correctly, the easier they get. The more unknown you are, the harder.

If you look farther down the page, you'll notice hashcash launched their proof-of-work captcha replacement thing today. I'm not saying it's related, but both of these are on the front page together.

have you tried this recently? zendesk's use of recaptcha was so bad that they are getting rid of it.

I personally experienced this and can't wait.