Captcha's - Where's the cool ones?!

[FrozenLaughs]

Just curious:

1. Where is everyone getting these cool/funny forum captchas from? I literally get nothing but Dish and Monopoly ads...

2. I know it's a system to prevent forum spam, but why aren't we "vetted" after a certain number of posts, or after a certain amount of time without Moderator warnings?

Thoughts? Discuss?

 

[Legion]

I have had Pubclub since it was first created so have never had any. I am also a very cynical person.

So my theory is that people make them up to be funny.

As for the second question, you are best off asking a staff member, but I suspect that is because captcha's are less time/resource intensive.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

1. Could be that the Captcha just hates you. If you've been here a while you should know that it is sentient and illogically malicious.

2. I don't know. Maybe the Escapist receives revenue from the ones that are ads? If so, then they're probably not going to implement a system where veterans are exempt from them.

 

[FrozenLaughs]

Using ads as captchas for revenue is an idea that hadn't crossed my mind. Good call! They can't be ad-blocked or you can't post anything... Very smart

 

[DoPo]

Using ads as captchas for revenue is an idea that hadn't crossed my mind. Good call! They can't be ad-blocked or you can't post anything... Very smart

You can, however, type in absolutely anything you want in them. And they are easy enough to spot even without looking at them, so whenever I got one, I'd just slam my hand on the keyboard and hit enter - it always works, and I don't even need to read it.

Anyway,

1. Where is everyone getting these cool/funny forum captchas from? I literally get nothing but Dish and Monopoly ads...

here are some I have gotten before.

Spoiler: CAPTCHAs

Probably the best.

In this context - not as much, but I remember it was funny in the context of the thread I was posting in.

The one I personally laughed at the most.

Dunno, just really like that one for some reason.

So my theory is that people make them up to be funny.

Interestingly, I started screencapping them because people sort of didn't believe these CAPTCHAs existed. I'm not sure why - they definitely do exist - Solve Media is one of the biggest CAPTCHA providers and you can see similar ones pretty much all over the Internet. It's really mostly Solve Media, reCAPTCHA and some in-house CAPTCHAs that you can see and the former two are definitely memorable. Heck - Solve Media owe part of their success because of reCAPTCHA - where reCAPTCHA are considered hard to decipher, Solve Media made the CAPTCHAs easy to read and even memorable by throwing in interesting sounding ones. That's even why we have it here now, when I joined, there was reCAPTCHA in the forums but it got changed later in 2012 as far as I recall.

2. I know it's a system to prevent forum spam, but why aren't we "vetted" after a certain number of posts, or after a certain amount of time without Moderator warnings?

Well, I guess it helps advertise the PubClub a bit - that gets rid of CAPTCHAS. But also it's an additional small amount of revenue for the Escapist. And it helps control the forum spam...well, I can't tell you how much - it's arguably quite a small amount, but it helps a bit at least. There may be other reasons, but these are the main ones I can think of.