Thread 8807

Real question, why are these captchas necessary?

I propose that they actual stifle many posters who want to participate in simple mindless conversation. I've been on the internet my whole life and even I still struggle sometimes to do these captchas.

They look weird on mobile (which makes up the majority of all internet traffic in the world), it takes a couple tries to get my finger on the slider button and half the time my phone tries to "swipe back" when I try to grab the slider, and even when I type the 6 character captcha I still sometimes get it wrong because they are just too weird. I'm not retarded but I seriously encounter a problem with the captcha like 30% of the time.

Follow up question
>why are the traditional recatpchas not adequate for 4chan but seem to be adequate for other big sites?

>>8808
4chan dumped reCAPTCHA around the time they announced they would charge everyone using over 1,000,000 calls per month.
According to 4stats, 4chan sometimes averages 1M posts per day. (down recently)
Do the math, I guess.

disclaimer: this is all speculation. I don't actually know the real reasons.
>>8807 (OP)
There needs to be some barrier against automated posting. I remember before the captcha was added and there was some website (anontalk? something like that) being spammed nonstop. While you can bypass this current captcha with OCR, it's still a barrier. I will agree, however, that it's a pain in the ass to use.
>>8808
two possible reasons come to mind. The first reason would be that, similar to only accepting crypto, the content hosted on 4chan really dissuades potential captcha hosts. The other reason I would guess is that 4chan just doesn't have the budget for enterprise-level support that would be required. For example, I don't think hcaptcha would be very happy if we signed up for a free plan and started pounding them with 800k requests per day - their "pro" plan (just a step below enterprise) is capped at 100k per month.

>>8807 (OP)
if we didn't have captchas implemented the site would be literally unusable with how much spam it would get
>>8808
our users are not the typical users that most sites get lol, let's put it that way

>>8807 (OP)
>I propose that they actual stifle many posters who want to participate in simple mindless conversation.
That's not exactly a bad thing for us.

>>8807 (OP)
>seeing captchas whatsoever
do you even janitor, bro?

Because otherwise the site would be absolutely overrun by bots and completely unusable. If you're running a website on the modern internet in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven Plus Eleven, you either need user registration that does robust bot filtering, or you need a captcha.

The average internet user does not even begin to comprehend how much automated shit is flying around everywhere.

I think OP was talking about these types of captchas specifically, and I agree that very often they're barely legible. I'm guessing we wouldn't have switched to these if the arms race between spam filters and neural networks training more competent bots didn't necessitate it.

>>8807 (OP)
Because 4chan was once being bot spammed to hell and back by a vengeful autistic pedophile who felt his free speech rights were infringed upon for being banned for something, among other things, and would advertise his own competing website (where he would discuss hist lust for children, and arbitrarily ban people left and right all the time), so captcha was introduced as a temporary solution to guys like him.
Turns out, captcha was so good at curtailing bot spam across the board that moot decided to make it a permanent feature.

How good is it at preventing it now? I don't know, but I'd imagine it still prevents a LOT of bot spam.

>>8832
OP here. Yes, I was referring specifically to these barely legible sliding captchas, not captchas in general. No other website in the world that i've seen uses these high difficulty sliding captchas, and I wonder why not just use an easier captcha that still filters bots. How hard would it be to program an in-house captcha assuming the other poster is correct about the costs of using name-brand captchas like recaptcha.

>>8850
>No other website in the world that i've seen uses these high difficulty sliding captchas
no other (major) website in the world allows users to post without making an account, let alone one with a userbase as... extraordinary as ours

>>8887
>[laughs in Slashdot]

>>8905
>see: major
It's extremely uncommon for stories to get three digits' worth of comments these days.

Slashdot comments (in both volume and quality) have gotten significantly worse, and their "mod points" moderation system is stupidly easy to game. AC posts almost never rise to the visibility threshold and if they do, almost always it was someone in the discussion thread sockpuppeting so that they can use their primary account to upvote their anonymous comments.

>>8807 (OP)
it's fine for posting but making people fill out a captcha for reporting has always seemed dumb to me.

>>8807 (OP)
I love captchas.

>>8960
t. reportbot 9001

>>8960
reports should have captchas for the same reason as posting but i say make the captchas three letters or something instead
but i can see how making reporting easier would be a problem on some boards

Consider passu

>>8966
Captcha length isn't relevant, either:
>robot can solve captcha
or,
>robot cannot solve captcha

I acknowledge that captchas are necessary, but the current captchas are just insane and half the time when im phoneposting and not logged into my account i just give up trying to comment because i fail it or my phone thinks im trying to "swipe back" instead of grab the slider and it deletes my comment.

Would it really be that hard for 4chan to code an in-house captcha system so they don't have to pay recaptcha but also don't have to use whatever this slider thing is, or at least turn the slider difficulty down... im no boomer but i'll admit to fucking up these captchas so frequently

>>8980
i did before i was a jani and saw that it required paying in crypto and said nah that is just too much work...

>>8993
>Would it really be that hard for 4chan to code an in-house captcha system

Yes. Especially in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven Plus Twelve, it should be obvious that identifying if a user is human or not is very difficult and that this task will get more and more difficult.

>>9043
Your comment hints at recent AI developments, and it got me thinking, what is it that AI simply CANNOT do? Hands, it can't recognize them properly, even the times where it gets it close, it's still off.

Now, I'm not suggesting (NECESSARILY), that we create a captcha based on selecting the hands which are anatomically incorrect, but that there's these various blind spots where a human being is readily able to tell when a picture is of a real life object (or at least accurately modeled), and either mush turned out by a computer, or something which somewhat resembles the target, yet exhibits striking errors.

I'm not sure if there's any easy way to implement this, but it seems like if it could, it would be the next step in the bot arms race. Perhaps it'll stop working one day, but even if it just kills bots for a decade, it could be worth it.

>>9045
The main problem is that AI research is an entire industry and research field, and a lot of brilliant people are working on making systems that can pretend to be human. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" but so much effort is being put into making it impossible to tell computers and humans apart that I think it's a losing battle unless you have a small crew of very expensive AI research PhDs and programmers, the equipment to run it, and the money to pay for running those systems.

The blind spots you're talking about are a field of research called "adversarial machine learning." What's funny is that 4chan is so old that when it opened in 2003, spam and bot-posting so unsophisticated that a simple banned-phrase-list would be enough. That stopped being true several years into 4chan's life, and this arms race has escalated far beyond the point where 4chan can pay for a home-grown system that can compete with tools available to bad actors.

We're long past the point of computers being able to pass Turing tests. Designing these tests is becoming more difficult. Computer systems will continue getting better due to all the money and research in the field, which means that you have to have staff who constantly work to keep these tests updated and the whole ordeal turns into an expensive game of cat-and-mouse where the mouse has a lot of money and the cat is a 20-year-old website that continues to exist and be fueled by rainbows and butterflies and hotpockets.

>>9053
>The main problem is that AI research is an entire industry and research field, and a lot of brilliant people are working on making systems that can pretend to be human. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" but so much effort is being put into making it impossible to tell computers and humans apart that I think it's a losing battle unless you have a small crew of very expensive AI research PhDs and programmers, the equipment to run it, and the money to pay for running those systems.
Don't make me a luddite, now.

>Computer systems will continue getting better due to all the money and research in the field
Nightmarish enough, but it's also not infinitely scalable.

>>9045
>robot arms race stumped by hands

>>9045
Also, the sliding puzzle piece captchas work great for this, I think

>>9045
AI is pretty bad at negatives. If you do a google search for "shirt without stripes", you get shirts with stripes.

>>8905
Slashdot has required an account for anonymous posting for a couple of years now.

>>9218
Damn. Times have changed.