...Really now, Escapist? I am disappoint.

[white_salad]

I didn't even realize there were captchas, shows how much I spend on this site.

 

[Lem0nade Inlay]

I don't really care...it takes like 2 seconds to type the word, and I don't pay attention to what it's advertising anyway..

 

[Canid117]

There were two spam bots that showed up before the catchpas honestly I would have given it a little more time to see if it got worse before taking the course of actions the mods did but its not my site so whatever. Not the end of the world.

 

[The-Bad-Blooded]

they had just began to be implemented when I joined...
they're so goddamn annoying! I post on two threads about completely different topics with less than 2 hours inbetween and allovasudden i'm a spammer? seriously?

 

[Fire Daemon]

I've noticed spam before, but it's never felt like such a large problem that captcha are needed. Obviously people are going to promote other threads over the spammers while a moderator silently takes care of them so it could be a larger problem than it appears, but I still can't believe that it's such a problem that people need a captcha for every 20th post to prove their humanity.

I would imagine that if a spambot managed to get past the original captcha when making it's account not much is going to stop it from getting past some others. I don't exactly understand the science behind it all so there is most certainly some valid reason for a captcha every 20th post, but the fact that they involve advertisements makes the entire thing seem really, really sneaky and cheap.

Ads keep the income coming in, and this site needs to make a profit, but forcing the ads on your client and making them interact with the ads while trying to justify their existence as anything but a profit making toll, well it's bound to piss some people off. I think that everyone is accepting of advertisement, but don't try and jerk people around pretending it's something else. They're bound to turn on you, people don't like being lied to.

I haven't seen one yet, and I'm not likely to because of my PubClub benefits, but I don't think that people deserve to be force fed ads just to enjoy the privilege of posting, especially when I browse this website while signed out and I notice that most of the banner ads are just for other Escapist shows. Why force ads on people in the form of captcha when you have plenty of advertisement space that you don't seem to be using?

But as I said, I haven't seen any of these yet. Maybe the company that provides them is the one that makes the profit, and The Escapist doesn't see a cent. Actually that seems likely, but may well not be the case. Either way though, it not working out the gate is pretty poor form from both the company that provides it and The Escapist for not checking them out enough. Nobody wants to sit down and fill out these things for hours on end, but someone has to do it I suppose.

 

[indiana_104]

i didn't notice any captchas...

edit: nevermind... i found em.

 

[neoontime]

Eh, they are easier to figure out for me.

 

[KefkaCultist]

Some people need to join the Tech Team group and turn on chat notifications so that you have a clue what is going on with escapist.

You would know many things like:
-Why they implemented captchas in the 1st place.
-You would know that you'll only get one on your second post, one on your 10th, and then one every 20th post after that each day.
-They are testing the new captchas on about half the people while others are still getting the recaptcha because recaptcha has had issues with coming up with legible stuff.
-And much more!

Heres a link to the group, join it and be informed!
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Tech-Team

So instead of making and sticking a global and stickied post everyone will read, I was supposed to be reading this user group all along I never knew existed and never even speculated that it WOULD exist? That seems silly to me.

There was a such a thread made but they didn't sticky it for some reason.

 

[Zenode]

I have 20/20 vision and i have trouble reading them....but i GUESS its for the best

 

[drbarno]

As far as I know, I think the mods had opted for a "Better safe than sorry" approach with them, seeing as I had no idea about any bots appearing before the captcha's, which can be sometimes funny.

 

[tharglet]

I have never seen spam in my year on the escapist.

Lol, I've seen about 3 or 4. Granted, a lot less than other forums I'm part of, but they are around. (Been here less than a year)

 

[Delusibeta]

Off topic, but I've never seen an illegible reCaptcha. The other type that they're introducing ("Solvemedia") sounds like something that should die in a fire, frankly.

(Not that I've experienced either on this site. I seem to have gotten lucky with the captachas here.)

[EDIT]

Yep, this type of capcha should die in a fire.

 

[Trivun]

Captchas doubling as adverts? Huh? I haven't seen any of those. And I'm honestly not fussed by the captchas. If they're actually helping to keep spam down (bear in mind that of course we haven't seen much spam, because it usually gets deleted almost straight away, but takes up a lot of mod and staff time behind the scenes, which we don't see) then I'm all for it. I don't see why everyone is so annoyed over them, to be honest...

 

[Dexiro]

The captchas have nothing to do with making money. It's because the site was becoming a target for spambots.

These ones are annoying though, they're barely readable 90% of the time.

My last captcha was ToyotaCare, and it had a background of a car, and it had a picture of a hand with a key being dropped into it. Are you sure you want to make that claim?

Ah I'm just getting the regular Captchas, only just heard about the one's with ads D:

 

[Recron]

well so far I haven't run into an captcha thing yet but then again I don't post very often but I can see how it can be annoying.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Half of the users get the new ones. They're seeing if these one's are easier than the ReCaptcha ones by checking the fail rate. Join the Tech Team Usergroup, they tell you about these things.

I've noticed that reCaptcha tends to serve up non-text or totally incomprehensible text fairly often, so we're going to test a different captcha system on about half the users (called Solvemedia). This one can mix phrases, animated images, or ads into the captcha instead of the reCaptcha scanned text images - the ones that I've seen so far tend to be a lot easier to understand (the ad-based ones are in clear, plain text).

Some people will continue to see the reCaptcha units, and won't notice any change at all. I'm tracking how many failures each type generates so I can figure out which one actually causes the least number failures.

The Solvemedia tech is based on the same stuff as reCaptcha, so it has reload and audio options too, which most of the other third-party systems don't seem to"

This is the PM that the Tech Team group sent out to all members of the usergroup.