Thursday, 7 February 2013

I'm Not A Robot!

At around 1am today ie about 22 hours ago I was having problems with Blogger in that it posted one of my posts 36 times.   To add insult to injury this evening when I tried to post my Thankful Thursday post I got the following message:
 
 I typed in etholudi 1521 and got the following message:

 
I know that paranoia is a silly response but bear in mind that just because I may be paranoid it doesn't mean that Blogger isn't out to get me.
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13 comments:

  1. Mark7 February 2013 at 23:43

    The Google captchas are really starting to annoy me, as I've had a few recently where I've struggled to enter the correct answer. What's weird is I can't work out where I'm going wrong.

    Assuming that they are still working as they were originally the reason there are two parts is that one is known and you are providing a service by decoding the other one for them -- i.e. not only are you proving you are human but to add insult to injury you are actually doing unpaid work! Originally the unknown words were taken from scans of old manuscripts; specifically words that the OCR system had failed on. Now of course Google are using images from their streetview cars (among other things) to get you to decode street addresses and signs. Given this I assume the photo is the unknown part and the random letters is auto-generated in some way. What I don't get is how we can all be misreading them as I read those the same way you did.

    The problem of course is that these systems are required to stop spam bots etc. from making a right mess of the internet. Interestingly Ticketmaster has recently stopped using captchas and has switched to a new system from Solve Media. They have a great video explaining the problems and their solution; unfortunately their solution means looking at adverts, so I'm not sure if this is really better or not. It might be slightly less frustrating though, which has to be some form of improvement.

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    1. GB8 February 2013 at 17:48

      How very interesting Mark. I had a look at the Solve Media video but I'll have to return because my internet connection seems to be too slow at the moment and I'm getting the words but not all the pictures. I often won't leave comments on blogs that have captchas just as I often don't leave comments that need moderating because I like to see the preceding comments as well as the post.

      Delete
  2. Librarian7 February 2013 at 23:54

    I do get plenty of spam comments on my blog on an almost daily basis, but I know that lots of people hate word verification, and therefore I have not activated it on my blog. The spam comments rarely make it to be published; usually, I simply delete the whole lot of them every day. That costs me less time and frustration than what it would cost one of my precious readers to deal with a captchas difficult to read.
    Why blogger would require YOU to verify you are not a robot, on your OWN blog, is beyond me!

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    1. GB8 February 2013 at 17:53

      I wonder, Meike, how spammers target blogs ie what criteria they use. I almost never have any spam and when I check the blogs spam folder there's never any there either. But why? I know that CJ gets lots of spam so he has comment moderation. I look at my blogs more frequently as a rule than CJ for example (who may have a gap if he has a few days with constant migraines) so if I do get the odd spam message I can delete it pretty quickly.

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  3. VirginiaC8 February 2013 at 00:23

    Blogger does have its days....why would you have to verify it was YOU on your own blog. Hope this is not something new they're incorporating on the blog account.
    What I have a problem with is the word verification on some blogs that I have to scroll through about five or six of the "Prove you're not a robot" pages until I find one that I can actually read.....so annoying.

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    1. GB8 February 2013 at 18:45

      Virginia Blogger managed to post one of my posts 36 times so they caused the problem! WV is very annoying: I think most people agree with that. The problem is that spammers are even more annoying to many people.

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  4. ADRIAN8 February 2013 at 01:11

    I read akenim as alrenim. Good job they are not case sensitive.
    I don't even bother trying now. I just click the little circular arrow till I get one I can read.

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    1. GB8 February 2013 at 18:47

      If I'm honest, Adrian, I don't usually have too many problems (perhaps 2 or 3 times occasionally)I just find the whole thing very irritating.

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  5. DawnTreader8 February 2013 at 05:12

    It's annoying enough coming across them on other people's blogs... To have them turn up when posting on your own seems a bit too much! I do hope it's just a temporary glitch for you.

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  6. Frances Garrood8 February 2013 at 11:28

    I usually have to do the word verification thingy about five times before I get it right. Maybe I am a robot....?

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    1. GB8 February 2013 at 22:53

      Good to see you here Frances. I know that you've visited before but you have featured in a number of fairly recent posts on this blog. The number of times you have thrown yourself off a horse and broken your back would seem to support your 'Maybe....'. Falling off once and breaking a collar bone was quite enough for me.

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  7. Jenny Woolf13 February 2013 at 00:30

    Of all the people who might be robots, you are surely one of the LEAST likely, methinks! :)

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