Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2015-03-17 Thread MZMcBride
Ricordisamoa wrote: Il 09/11/2014 18:33, MZMcBride ha scritto: Marc A. Pelletier wrote: But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users signing up. So, there's a tradeoff. Eh, I think the anecdotal

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2015-03-17 Thread Ricordisamoa
Il 18/03/2015 04:30, MZMcBride ha scritto: Ricordisamoa wrote: Il 09/11/2014 18:33, MZMcBride ha scritto: Marc A. Pelletier wrote: But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users signing up. So,

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2015-03-17 Thread Ricordisamoa
Il 09/11/2014 18:33, MZMcBride ha scritto: Marc A. Pelletier wrote: But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users signing up. So, there's a tradeoff. Eh, I think the anecdotal data (such as

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2015-03-17 Thread Ricordisamoa
Il 10/11/2014 17:23, Chris Steipp ha scritto: On the general topic, I think either a captcha or verifying an email makes a small barrier to building a bot, but it's significant enough that it keeps the amateur bots out. I'd be very interested in seeing an experiment run to see what the exact

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-11 Thread Platonides
Max Semenik wrote: I'm pretty sure most users technical enough to use IRC are able to solve captchas well. That the backend is irc-based doesn't mean the would use a IRC frontend. We routinely point to web irc, and plenty of noobs have proven able to reach there (sometimes even thinking we

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-09 Thread MZMcBride
Robert Rohde wrote: I suspect we could weed out a lot of spammy link behavior by designing an external link classifier that used knowledge of what external links are frequently included and what external links are frequently removed to generate automatic good / suspect / bad ratings for new

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-05 Thread Federico Leva (Nemo)
20 minutes of test are really not enough. I didn't find a significant increase in spam: if I see correctly, some more inactive accounts were created and 2 userpages, which had not been previously created, were added by two IPs. Let's collect information on

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread Chris Steipp
On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 9:15 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed Dec 03 2014 at 8:18:53 PM MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: svetlana wrote: On Thu, 4 Dec 2014, at 15:02, MZMcBride wrote: We disabled the CAPTCHA entirely on test.wikipedia.org a few weeks ago. The wiki seems

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread svetlana
Steven Walling wrote: There are about a million IP edits a month on English Wikipedia alone, last time we checked.[1] If we increased anonymous bot spam by even only 1/10th of the total number of edits before we managed to put IP blocks in place, that's still 100k edits worth of spam. That's

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread Comet styles
Until they fix captcha or allow Global Filters to become truly global, there will always be a risk of spambots. For someone who deals with these on a regular basis and has been doing it for years, making the Captcha system more friendly to users also means making it more 'friendly' to spam bot

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread Chad
On Thu Dec 04 2014 at 2:45:39 PM Chris Steipp cste...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 9:15 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed Dec 03 2014 at 8:18:53 PM MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: svetlana wrote: On Thu, 4 Dec 2014, at 15:02, MZMcBride wrote: We

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread Helder .
On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 9:27 PM, svetlana svetl...@fastmail.com.au wrote: I like how my message to try abandoning captcha entirely came up with a myriad of complaints how we can be smart, enable new captcha which is unique, etc. Let's measure the impact. Could someone kindly please do some

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread John Mark Vandenberg
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 7:48 AM, Comet styles cometsty...@gmail.com wrote: Until they fix captcha or allow Global Filters to become truly global, there will always be a risk of spambots. For someone who deals with these on a regular basis and has been doing it for years, making the Captcha

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread Robert Rohde
On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Comet styles cometsty...@gmail.com wrote: Until they fix captcha or allow Global Filters to become truly global, there will always be a risk of spambots. For someone who deals with these on a regular basis and has been doing it for years, making the Captcha

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread MZMcBride
Chad wrote: Well that was a fun experiment for an hour. Turns out captchas do actually stop a non-zero amount of spam on non-test wikis. Mediawiki.org logs tell the story pretty clearly. This has been rolled back. :-( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Log/delete I spent a bit of time

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread Robert Rohde
On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 8:08 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: snip Robert, let me know if you want access on mediawiki.org to look at the deleted edits, though they're quite boring. It wouldn't hurt to take a look. Though I suspect getting feedback from people who look at these things

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-04 Thread John Mark Vandenberg
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 11:08 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Chad wrote: Well that was a fun experiment for an hour. Turns out captchas do actually stop a non-zero amount of spam on non-test wikis. Mediawiki.org logs tell the story pretty clearly. This has been rolled back. :-(

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread florian.schmidt.wel...@t-online.de
regards Florian Schmidt -Original-Nachricht- Betreff: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly Datum: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 17:23:46 +0100 Von: Chris Steipp cste...@wikimedia.org An: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org On Sunday, November 9, 2014, Platonides platoni

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread svetlana
I like these thoughts: - https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-November/079340.html Literally an anti-captcha. Letting bots in and keeping humans out. - https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-November/079346.html Why not disable the ConfirmEdit extension for a week

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Chad
On Wed Dec 03 2014 at 1:27:33 PM svetlana svetl...@fastmail.com.au wrote: I like these thoughts: - https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014- November/079340.html Literally an anti-captcha. Letting bots in and keeping humans out. -

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Ryan Kaldari
The main reason our captcha is easy for bots to bypass isn't because it's easy to read (it's not); it's because it works the same way as 90% of other captcha's on the internet. So if you're a spam-bot writer, all you have to do is download one of the dozens of generic captcha-breaking programs on

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread David Gerard
On 3 December 2014 at 23:08, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: Surely we can come up with a creative idea that is: * Easy for humans to solve * Can't be solved by out-of-the-box captcha breakers * Isn't trivial for programmers to solve * isn't an abomination for accessibility -

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Jay Ashworth
- Original Message - From: Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org spambots. We just have to jump out of the existing captcha design band-wagon. Here are some ideas: Surely we can come up with a creative idea that is: * Easy for humans to solve * Can't be solved by out-of-the-box

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread svetlana
I like how my message to try abandoning captcha entirely came up with a myriad of complaints how we can be smart, enable new captcha which is unique, etc. Let's measure the impact. Could someone kindly please do some metrics on these cases after a user opened an edit box: - edit saved without

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Risker
It's a cool idea. Also not usable by those who are visually impaired, as best I can tell. I'm going to be honest, I think svetlana may be on to something. Risker/Anne On 3 December 2014 at 18:17, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Ryan Kaldari

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Tim Starling
On 04/12/14 10:08, Ryan Kaldari wrote: The main reason our captcha is easy for bots to bypass isn't because it's easy to read (it's not); Actually, it's extremely easy to read. As I said in the commit message on I05b5bb6, I was able to break 66% of FancyCaptcha images with the open source OCR

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread MZMcBride
svetlana wrote: I like how my message to try abandoning captcha entirely came up with a myriad of complaints how we can be smart, enable new captcha which is unique, etc. Let's measure the impact. We disabled the CAPTCHA entirely on test.wikipedia.org a few weeks ago. The wiki seems to be about

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread svetlana
Hi, On Thu, 4 Dec 2014, at 15:02, MZMcBride wrote: svetlana wrote: I like how my message to try abandoning captcha entirely came up with a myriad of complaints how we can be smart, enable new captcha which is unique, etc. Let's measure the impact. We disabled the CAPTCHA entirely on

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Steven Walling
MZ: you mean removing just for account creation right? There is also a CAPTCHA delivered on external link addition for some editors–I think IPs and users not autoconfirmed. This is probably a lot more important for combating spam. (Sorry for top posting. On my phone.) On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 8:03

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread MZMcBride
svetlana wrote: On Thu, 4 Dec 2014, at 15:02, MZMcBride wrote: We disabled the CAPTCHA entirely on test.wikipedia.org a few weeks ago. The wiki seems to be about the same. It probably makes sense to continue slowly disabling the CAPTCHA on wikis until users start to shout. Perhaps we'll

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Robert Rohde
We have many smart people, and undoubtedly we could design a better captcha. However, no matter how smart the mousetrap, as long as you leave it strewn around the doors and hallways, well-meaning people are going to trip over it. I would support removing the captcha from generic entry points,

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Daniel Friesen
On 2014-12-03 8:35 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: However, captchas might be useful if used in conjunction with simple behavioral analysis, such as rate limiters. For example, if an IP is creating a lot of accounts or editing at a high rate of speed, those are bad signs. Don't we already do rate

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread svetlana
Hi Robert, With accounts it is no problem, we can just make them enter a captcha when registering and assume they're human from now on. However where an IP contributor enters a captcha, we can't assume it's human because IPs are often shared. There is lots of past discussion on

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Robert Rohde
On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 8:47 PM, Daniel Friesen dan...@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote: On 2014-12-03 8:35 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: However, captchas might be useful if used in conjunction with simple behavioral analysis, such as rate limiters. For example, if an IP is creating a lot of accounts

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread MZMcBride
Steven Walling wrote: MZ: you mean removing just for account creation right? There is also a CAPTCHA delivered on external link addition for some editors–I think IPs and users not autoconfirmed. This is probably a lot more important for combating spam. For testwiki, we actually set

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Chad
On Wed Dec 03 2014 at 8:18:53 PM MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: svetlana wrote: On Thu, 4 Dec 2014, at 15:02, MZMcBride wrote: We disabled the CAPTCHA entirely on test.wikipedia.org a few weeks ago. The wiki seems to be about the same. It probably makes sense to continue slowly

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-12-03 Thread Steven Walling
On Wed Dec 03 2014 at 8:57:38 PM MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Steven Walling wrote: MZ: you mean removing just for account creation right? There is also a CAPTCHA delivered on external link addition for some editors–I think IPs and users not autoconfirmed. This is probably a lot more

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-10 Thread Chris Steipp
On Sunday, November 9, 2014, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/11/14 02:52, Jon Harald Søby wrote: The main concern is obviously that it is really hard to read, but there are also some other issues, namely that all the fields in the user registration form (except for the

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread aude
On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 8:51 AM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: We're talking about a test, not a broad rollout (: I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being required to supply a throwaway email address would have discouraged you from opening a Wikimedia account?

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread David Gerard
On 9 November 2014 09:27, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 8:51 AM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being required to supply a throwaway email address would have discouraged you from opening a Wikimedia

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Brian Wolff
On Nov 9, 2014 5:39 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 November 2014 09:27, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 8:51 AM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being required to supply a throwaway email

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Marc A. Pelletier
On 11/09/2014 10:20 AM, Brian Wolff wrote: Does anyone have any attack scenario that is remotely plausible which requiring a verified email would prevent? Spambots (of which there are multitude, and that hammer any mediawiki site constantly) have gotten pretty good at bypassing captchas but

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread MZMcBride
Marc A. Pelletier wrote: But there is also a great heap of anecdotal data that shows that having to provide an email account increases the barrier of entry to users signing up. So, there's a tradeoff. Eh, I think the anecdotal data (such as Facebook's and Google's hundreds of millions account

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Marc A. Pelletier
On 11/09/2014 12:33 PM, MZMcBride wrote: Hmmm, I imagine many spambots have already made this investment if they're dealing with popular systems that require e-mail address confirmation. No doubt there are some that do; but it's a very different technical hurdle and the management tradeoff

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Platonides
On 09/11/14 06:21, Pine W wrote: Discussing an option with the community to test replacing registration CAPTCHAs with an email requirement makes sense to me. I would support a small, carefully designed test. If someone is motivated to create a Wikimedia account and they don't want to register an

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Martijn Hoekstra
On Nov 9, 2014 10:40 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 November 2014 09:27, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 8:51 AM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being required to supply a throwaway

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Platonides
On 07/11/14 02:52, Jon Harald Søby wrote: The main concern is obviously that it is really hard to read, but there are also some other issues, namely that all the fields in the user registration form (except for the username) are wiped if you enter the CAPTCHA incorrectly. So when you make a

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Platonides
On 09/11/14 17:19, Marc A. Pelletier wrote: On 11/09/2014 10:20 AM, Brian Wolff wrote: Does anyone have any attack scenario that is remotely plausible which requiring a verified email would prevent? Spambots (of which there are multitude, and that hammer any mediawiki site constantly) have

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Pine W
For purposes of account creation, I think of spambots and vandalbots as being in the same. If our CAPTCHAs are deterring a significant percentage of humans while allowing a significant percentage of bots through, we should change something. Pine On Nov 9, 2014 4:38 PM, Platonides

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Max Semenik
I'm pretty sure most users technical enough to use IRC are able to solve captchas well. On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 3:45 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: On 09/11/14 06:21, Pine W wrote: Discussing an option with the community to test replacing registration CAPTCHAs with an email

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-09 Thread Risker
On 9 November 2014 02:51, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: We're talking about a test, not a broad rollout (: I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being required to supply a throwaway email address would have discouraged you from opening a Wikimedia account? Pine

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-08 Thread Eran Rosenthal
+1 for disabling CAPTCHs (at least in signup form). Anyway, sysops already have enougth tools for treating abuse by spam bots using AbuseFilter (e.g with rate filter). On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 12:19 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Tim Starling wrote: On 07/11/14 19:17, svetlana wrote:

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-08 Thread Steven Walling
On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 2:19 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I think that's unfair. Wikis have a serious spam problem. People associate CAPTCHAs with spam prevention. On the English Wikipedia, one of the actions that results in the user being required to successfully enter a CAPTCHA

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-08 Thread Brian Wolff
For some more background, when we proposed something like that to Chris Steipp he was pretty iffy about it, and he's not wrong. At other sites that don't have a CAPTCHA on signup (like Facebook, Quora, others) they avoid a spam problem in part because they require an email address and

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-08 Thread Risker
Umm. No. If ever you want major pushback from the broad international community, requiring any kind of documentation to open an account will probably work very well. I certainly would never have signed up for an account on Wikipedia if I'd had to supply an email address. Risker/Anne On 9

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-08 Thread Pine W
We're talking about a test, not a broad rollout (: I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being required to supply a throwaway email address would have discouraged you from opening a Wikimedia account? Pine ___ Wikitech-l mailing

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-07 Thread svetlana
On Fri, 7 Nov 2014, at 16:33, Dan Garry wrote: On 6 November 2014 21:06, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I think it would be best if we just removed the captcha, rather than deploying a new engine. I'd absolutely love that. On the mobile app, almost everyone who tries to

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-07 Thread Tim Starling
On 07/11/14 19:17, svetlana wrote: I would suggest to ask on a village pump and alter the configuration per local consencus. We tried that before and the answer was OMG no, even though nobody bothered to look at the logs. It turns out that the captcha we were using was broken from the outset

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-07 Thread Federico Leva (Nemo)
+1 on Tim. FancyCaptcha is worse than useless. Nemo ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-07 Thread Brian Wolff
On 11/7/14, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: +1 on Tim. FancyCaptcha is worse than useless. Nemo ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l Literally an

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-07 Thread MZMcBride
Tim Starling wrote: On 07/11/14 19:17, svetlana wrote: I would suggest to ask on a village pump and alter the configuration per local consencus. We tried that before and the answer was OMG no, even though nobody bothered to look at the logs. It turns out that the captcha we were using was broken

[Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Jon Harald Søby
Hi all, My apologies if this is the wrong place to start a discussion on this, but it's a better place than nowhere. I recently took part in two very different Wikipedia workshops -- one in Uganda for schoolchildren aged 14-17, and one Bodø, Norway, for GLAM people aged 35-55. One glaringly

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Ryan Kaldari
Wasn't a new CAPTCHA engine merged a couple weeks ago? What's the status of that? If I remember, the goal of the new engine was to make the CAPTCHA more difficult for bots, so it may (or may not) make things worse for humans. Have we ever done any research to find out how likely humans are to

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Tim Starling
I think it would be best if we just removed the captcha, rather than deploying a new engine. -- Tim Starling On 07/11/14 13:13, Ryan Kaldari wrote: Wasn't a new CAPTCHA engine merged a couple weeks ago? What's the status of that? If I remember, the goal of the new engine was to make the

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Dan Garry
On 6 November 2014 21:06, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I think it would be best if we just removed the captcha, rather than deploying a new engine. I'd absolutely love that. On the mobile app, almost everyone who tries to create an account is shown a captcha. Of those people,

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Pine W
I'm interested both in improving our user stats and stamping out spambots. Dan, how do we know that those 17 percent were predominantly humans? I've heard that automated captcha cracking is common. Perhaps so, but if taking away captchas increases the workload of stewards and admins, that

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Dan Garry
On 6 November 2014 22:39, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: I'm interested both in improving our user stats and stamping out spambots. Dan, how do we know that those 17 percent were predominantly humans? We don't know for certain that they're human. That said, why would a spambot try to use

Re: [Wikitech-l] Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly

2014-11-06 Thread Pine W
Good point. Perhaps there is a case to be made for a small-scale experiment of removing the CAPTCHA. I suggest consulting the stewards for their thoughts. We have at least one steward who is supposedly an expert on spambots, and his input may be valuable. You might also consult the admins of