[Hidden-tech] Captcha help, please

[Stephen Michel]

 From the perspective of a human using the internet, please— anything 
but reCAPTCHA.

Standard captcha solutions score you based on how well you did at 
completing the challenge. If you get the answer right, you are allowed 
to submit the form. If you get it wrong, try again.

Google's reCAPTCHA scores you based on how well you protect your 
privacy. If it can figure out who you are, it'll often let you through 
without any challenge at all, just clicking the checkbox. If it's just 
a little uncertain, it'll give you  a quick challenge. If you've done 
well at protecting your privacy, it'll throw you an extremely 
time-consuming challenge, where you have to complete round after round 
of selecting images that fade in and out over many seconds (as you 
select them, they're replaced by another). I've spent as much as 5 
minutes trying to solve these (and being gaslit, told my correct 
answers are wrong). It's the most inhumane captcha solution on the 
internet.

You probably don't need it. If you are providing a major newsletter, 
and the spammers are specifically targeting your site, then you may 
need reCAPTCHA, because it's also the most resilient against this kind 
of targeted attack. However, most likely, there's no actual human 
looking at your site; they just set a bot to search for sites with 
forms and submit them automatically. That means the simplest deterrent 
will stop them.

At https://wiki.hcoop.net, we have a simple textcha: It's just an 
additional field to submit on the form, which picks one of two 
questions: "What is the first name of the author of the GNU Manifesto?" 
and "What is the last name of the current Debian project leader?". They 
are both trivial to look up and are totally sufficient to stop the spam 
wiki edits that we were being hit by before. We've been using them for 
years without changing them (except when Debian elects a new leader).

If you need a step up from that, or an external service you can just 
embed in a page, hcaptcha is decent. Just, please, not reCAPTCHA.

Best,
Stephen
-- 
To respect your time, I try to write short, functional emails.

On Wed, Jan 19 2022 at 02:34:08 PM -0500, Erik Jonsberg via 
Hidden-discuss <hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net> wrote:
> Hi Shel,
> 
> I’ve had a fair amount of experience configuring reCaptcha on 
> WordPress. What forms are you using?
> 
> You can PM me on Facebook if you want to. I can’t do anything today 
> but I’m available all day tomorrow.
> 
> - Erik Jonsberg
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Jan 19, 2022, at 1:50 PM, Shel Horowitz via Hidden-discuss 
>> <hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Hi, everyone,
>> 
>> I got a note from GetResponse (my email newsletter host) that my 
>> account is suspended because one of my sites (my main one, 
>> GoingBeyondSustainability.com) is out of compliance with captcha and 
>> is being robobombed. I installed the Advanced noCaptcha and 
>> Invisible Captcha plugin but I can't figure out how to do anything 
>> with it.
>> 
>> Can someone either talk me through it or (better) let me hire them 
>> to get it all working (could be a different Captcha plugin--I have 
>> no particular attachment to this one)? My next newsletter is slated 
>> to mail on 2/14.
>> 
>> --
>> Shel Horowitz - "The Transformpreneur"
>> ________________________________________________
>> Contact me to bake in profitability while addressing hunger,
>> poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change
>> * First business ever to be Green America Gold Certified
>> * Inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame
>> * Certified speaker: International Platform Association
>> http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
>> mailto:shel at greenandprofitable.com 413-586-2388
>> Award-winning, best-selling author of 10 books.
>> Latest: Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World
>> (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)
>> 
>> Watch my TEDx Talk,
>> "Impossible is a Dare: Business for a Better World"
>> http://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809
>> (move your mouse to "event videos")
>> _________________________________________________
>> 
>> ᐧ
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