That girl was always falling again and again

[venta]

I've noticed, of late, that I've been getting worse at filling in captchas correctly. I think that they're getting worse, and harder to read - but possibly this is just the equivalent of declaring as you get older than all your friends have started mumbling.

This was today's particularly troublesome specimen:



Is it just me, or is the second word hard to read, and the last letter just a splodge?

Is captcha-reading software getting better, forcing captchas to become ever more illegible?

Or am I, in fact, slowly devolving into a spam bot?

Comments

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

ReCaptchas only use the first word to stop spambots. The second word is unknown to the computer software - they're using you as free labour to tell them what the word ought to be. Don't worry about getting it wrong - they test it out on many people!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha! I did not know that. Thank you :)

[hughe.livejournal.com]

yup as it says: first word = stop spam, second word = read books.

they take the most common suggestion and use that as the OCR word. reCaptchas are a little forgiving anyway.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I agree it says that, but I hardly think "stop spam read books" explains the whole thing!

Even the "?" text (which I've never read before, because I assumed it was the usual patronising "what is this?" text rather than an explanation of a thing I didn't even realise was happening) doesn't actually tell you about the first word/second word difference.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Strictly, one of the words is unknown; the order is varied randomly (otherwise it'd defeat the point).