Comment on captchas like these that don't tell you which part of the text you're supposed to input

• Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Kinda… Slightly more helpful, but almost as vague. I’m advising against opting for solutions that are technically correct but would be more difficult for the average person to get right most of the time.

  The OP’s CAPTCHA as a case in point, it’s frustrating for them because they’re ostensibly asked to enter the characters that they see but there are several and the length of the string of characters is not known and some characters are hard to read and depending on how you interpret it you could be being asked to enter all these characters or you could look at them and say there’s a background set and a foreground set in which case, which one is the correct one? That’s at least 3 different ways to do it and that’s assuming that what appears to us a representation of depth is indeed intended to be the basis of separation for 2 sets of characters and not some other arbitrary categorisation or no categorisation. Sounds complicated and ambiguous. Except, it’s much harder to read the background set, and the idea that there would even be some other way of categorising, if it occurs to anyone at all would be impossible to work out since if it’s there, it’s not discernible. The easiest way is to just read the letters that aren’t partially covered up and also smaller than the more obvious, easier to read, not occluded characters and disregard the ones behind it.

  There’s no explicit instruction to do this, it’s wishy washy and hard to abstract for different CAPTCHAs which is why this advice doesn’t look a whole lot better than “just guess right” but in a way that’s kind of part of why they still have some effectiveness, they’re unspoken rules that humans Intuit and where some of us, like me before kinda “getting it”, go wrong is in overthinking and over analysing it. “but what if they mean this? I mean technically it could…” If you’re thinking like that, odds are you’re barking up the wrong tree and the solution is way less sophisticated.

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