Hey, List Owners With Captcha, Give Webmasters A Break
 

I've just opened up the number of lists I'm submitting to, partly prompted by the thread Cleo started on who will accept a single URL recip. OK, fine. But ffs, I can't read the shit you're asking for - letters and numbers very cleverly disguised on backgrounds and shapes designed to make the fucking things unreadable. If you don't want us to list with you, just say so.

I work hard making good, honest sites. You have logging in to prevent spam. You have a raft of other measures. so why do you need the fucking torture?

Which fucking idiot are you getting your advice from?

Rant over. If I can't see the "security" letters and numbers easily first time, I ain't going there no more. It's bullshit anyway. There are better, more effective ways to do it.

Wow, rage much? Some of those security writings are a bit hard to read but usually I can, as Im sure most others can, get through them - point is, I think you just killed a fly with a hand-grenade.

I can understand the rage. Submiting freesites is the last thing i do before i call it a day. And after 10 - 16 hours of work reading those little numbers and letters can be a fucker. The only ones that bother me now are when they have 0oO's and 1lL's. Everthing else ive gotten use to.

I just had a lovely time listing to a lot of lists which are a joy to work with. It is notable that the best ones seem to be the ones which turn up in my stats time after time as sending traffic in my direction. great stuff, thanks, guys, keep it going. They are also the ones with effective security measures which work without annoying.

I want to try and give some of the smaller lists and newer ones as much space as I can. But I spent half my time on 48 submissions with half a dozen or so who have so many "security" measures including no way to make out the numbers and letters on the backgrounds given, not one of which has yet shown in my stats, I thought it worth a mention. Half a dozen failed attempts at trying to read the fucking things and still getting it wrong, as a human reader, tells me it's not the submitters who have got it wrong.

The other thing I've discovered, if you don't shout, nobody listens.

Those images can be a pain in the arse and they're only suppose to stop auto submits.
They don't have to be unreadable though so whatever dumb fuck came up with that idea needs dry fucking analy with something very spikey.

using the numerical images makes life easier for everyone.

I can add on to this rant...the other day I had a captcha with letters and one of the letters where white on a white background...that shit was pissing me off...and it sucks when you already have the recip in the recip table and you're ready to just submit and go to bed...fortunately, the site I was submitting to retains your data when you refresh the page there are several LLs out there that don't and some don't even retain your inputs when the form comes back with an error like invalid url or description too long...how about those sights where the captcha is BELOW the submit button...that's almost the worst...

There are programs that can read plain text and bypass the verification. There is even one that can bypass captcha.

Why not use something like roboform? One click and the blanks are all filled in. Select the category and enter the code. It's not that hard. :)

Seems there's some concensus so I'm now glad I posted. The mild annoyances, like getting the catcha under the submit button, I can live with. Most don't delete the info you've just put in.

But I'm not going to start using autosubmitters 'cos I don't want to get banned by all the list owners. Having gone to the trouble to add the link to the table, then fill in the form and go out of my way to get it right, covering all the foibles like a non-standard entry (i.e. only a small number of owners do it this way whilst all the others actually do not want what is being asked for) then finding I have to squint at disguised crap like that for minutes, only to get it wrong, do it again, wrong again, and again. The non-standards I mention are things like title length or style, description length, so you have to do one especially for that one, single list, and so forth. I really don't mind them.

Like the others who have posted, submission is the last thing in the sequence so it is usually when I am about to go to bed. Being kept up an extra hour on stuff like that, knowing damned well most of the most awkward ones are not going to generate any traffic anyway, is not a productive use of my time or temper.

Incidentally, Maj. Stress, I was accepted by you so you can't have one of those disguised character things I'm on about. Out of the ones I try usually, I get at least a couple right. I failed and gave up on every single one last night. I now have the task of going through the lists I have of places to submit to or I'll be leaving holes in my links tables.

Whew, so I'm not the only one having difficulties with reading the captchas? My husband is actually getting me a new monitor today, cause some of the verification systems there are way too hard on my old eyes. If the LL doesn't send a lot of traffic and makes life hard for me, I'll stop submitting to it. I respect the LL owner's right to use any measures he or she wants to on their site, so I just weigh the pros and cons for me and make my own decision.

I can imagine auto submits are annoying but surely there must be a better way than these unreadable images. :)

I'm not sure if anyone's having trouble reading mine or not. I can see it just fine. I tried several different ways to combat spam, and the captcha was the best solution for me. At one point I was getting over 700 submissions a day. Imagine trying to pick through all that and cull out the good stuff. Impossible. Partner accounts don't work. Email verification doesn't work. The autosubmitters have support for both.

If anyone is having problems reading my captcha, please let me know. I recall seeing something about being able to adjust the contrast on the image but couldn't find it right off hand. If it's a problem, I'll research it further.

Yours look fine to me, i refreshed the page a few times and read them off straight away.

I have not had a single problem with Free Sex Pics, other than when I forget to do the damned thing on my way in! There is sufficient contrast to read it easily.

I am not against taking measures to ensure it is a human being submitting, even that it is a registered/qualified/recognised or whatever human being. I am simply not a masochist and will not submit to any more lists whose owners insist I must suffer pain.

I'm not as young as I used to be after a round of submitting my poor vision starts to fade. I can deal with some of them, but there are a few I had to remove from my submit list...I just couldn't read the fucker...a real bitch after typing in all the information, then getting to the bottom looking at some abstract bullshit that is supposed to be numbers and letters. The ones that are particularly cruel are those that wipe out all your information when you go back.

Life's short, and I just can't deal with it...I am starting remove those that are just too damn hard to read.

I have to admit that while I hate these things it seems they are needed. The best captcha I have seen is on spamarrest. They are real words and if you can't read it, it will read it to you aloud.

Some are better than others, for sure. I haven't seem the admin side of these captcha images, but can list owners control the degree of difficulty?

I can on a PHP directory so i imagine they can.

Exactly! I know some of you have complained to me about not being able to read the captcha on Click 4Sex Fun. Sorry about that but it's the most effective for my list as far as combating autosubmits. I'd use captcha on Sexy Smut Links if I could but that script doesn't support it. If I could control the level of difficulty as far as the background/text/words/letters, I would but can't. Again, sorry to anyone that can't read it but if it's that much of a problem for you, just go ahead and move on to another list. |waves|

Yours are legible, ladydesigner. No problem. You have to see the ones I'm moaning about to see why I'm moaning. They really are indiscernible.

I'm getting the hang of your title needs too. I think. |badidea|

Can I change the title of this thread to:

Hey, List Owners With Captcha, Give Webmasters A Break

so that I'm not automatically annoyed when I read it?

This makes me want to add a captcha (or three). :D

Hey, Greenie, please be my guest. That was never the intention.

As I've repeated all over the thread, most of you guys make life easier than I had any right to expect on day one, take the trouble to give helpful responses when we don't understand something and are a pleasure to work with.

This thread is aimed at a very small number of people. They either have perfect eyesight and colour perception, or they haven't checked their sites to see what's happening.

I feel better now :)

I think mine is readable :D

Both fine, JackDaniels.

Captchas are necessary today if want to protect your site from viagra spammers and such. It's not very fun to wake up in the morning and see hundreds of spam submits. I do agree they are annoying and I've tried other things like banning spammer ips in htaccess but it didn't work at all. The only effective method I know is using captchas.

I really don't have a problem with them at all, but if more could use the one like hoes.com does, it would be a lot easier.

Like Jim said, if you can't read that one, then you need better glasses

Point made, I think. I had a look around those I was having most difficulties with and they are all now readable, so peeps read here. Thanks for a great board, GG&J! |thumb

There is nothing inherently wrong with captchas. Hoes is so easy to use I hadn't even registered it as one, which illustrates the point I've been making. If anyone's going to attract the crap as well as the submissions, it's going to be them and a few others. So if a readable one works for them, why were the smaller guys hiding access from the peeps they want to let in?

Anyway, it seems people have been taking note. I just slapped four submissions of (I hope) good sites on one I couldn't even read last week - I had it down as a "don't even bother any more". :D

Maybe I have been lucky, but I use to get spammed with crap and spammers and I just added a question and answer on the submit form, which I can change at any time and could be any question. Never had a problem since.

Using the same concept on some blogs.

I know I've seen talk of bots reading images, seems it's caused captcha images to be tougher for even humans to read...:(

Which is why I like your approach, Ronnie. It works, ffs. That's all it takes. For the users, it's easy to read and takes a few seconds. For the webmaster, it's easy to put in, easy to control and easy to change. For the bots, it's impossible.

I wouldn't say it's bullet proof, thats my question, if they can read images, could they read text? Seems they would have to have some intelligence though. Only time will tell.

I don't know about being easy to put in place. It was easy for me as it is my own script, so I know the code and how it works. Might not be as easy for other scripts. Might be a good suggestion for script owners to give the creators.

Seems captcha "was" a solution.

Maybe they can. I'm not sure but you have a pm with a link. See what you think about that.

Whoever writes the script to defeat that approach would have to second guess each and every possible question you could ask, get the script/bot they are writing to recognise and distinguish between them, and supply the correct answer.

I wouldn't like to be charged with writing that one! You have found a good solution, ronnie.

It might be a good solution, but it wasn't my finding. The idea has been around for some time..:)

lol. No need to claim proprietary rights. If it's in the public domain, you can use it.

As a programmer, I can tell you right now that there is currently no way for anyone to stop auto-submitters via your forms.. Captcha can be bypassed and more and more auto-submitters will be building that into their software as time goes on... All these methods really do is push the real submitters away and you end up with primarily auto submitted stuff which will tend to redirect or install exploits etc.

For the idea of putting on a question.. Here's how I would overcome that... First thing I do is reload your form a bunch of times to get a bunch of your question... (a group of guys that auto-submit a shit load could have some lackey check your form a couple times a week and do this as necessary)... Then I put the questions and answers in my DB. Another thing I do is have a script monitor your submit form.. You change it and I get flagged to check it out and see if I need to make changes to my script. So now my autosubmitter goes to your page and if I recognise the question, I submit.. If I don't, then I reload until I find a question I know. If my autosubmitter reaches some threshold of reloads, it stops and flags me so that I have to go to your site and grab a bunch of your new questions... then I reset and away I go again... If you use "simple" questions, I can actually code it in so that I can answer them automatically. Let's say you actually write code to monitor your page to see if the page is reloaded a bunch of times before submitting and you stop that.. no problem, I'll just use some proxies... and the bigger auto-submitters are going to have multiple cheap dial-up accounts to be able to do this stuff as well.

Instead of trying to stop all these auto-submits, ask yourself WHY you want to stop them... Is it because they end up redirecting etc.? Then set up a program to scan your DB to auto-delete sites that end up doing that.. Is it because they change the site? Then implement code to store a CRC32 or MD5 of all 4 pages and then scan the pages and delete the site if they change... Get more active in banning domains, IP blocks, registrars, nameservers and affiliate IDs on the sites... Don't accept sites where the nameserver is some other site or the same as the domain that's been submitted... Don't allow submissions that are coming from servers... And more...

All of this stuff should be part of your DB software and be automatic for the most part. You need to fight technology with technology but just be aware that you will always be behind and playing catchup. I hate cheating submitters and I've been battling these guys for a long time now... I do all of this stuff on my TGPs and it makes a big difference. It's allowed me to keep my submit forms completely open for 5 years now.

By the way.. I'm currently hand submitting some free sites and it's just not cost effective from the amount of traffic/sales that are generated... I'm seriously considering auto-submitting...

I should mention something else I do... If you do decide to continue using something like Captcha, then perhaps you should implement a submitter "rating" system.. For example, on my sites I monitor my submitters... as time passes and they "prove" themselves (or can otherwise show they're not cheaters, gallery spammers etc.), they get to move up in the listings and get relaxed rules. So for example, if you have submitters that you know aren't cheaters, then let them submit without captcha.

That's a very interesting post, Viper. I use Dragon Scipts which requires the submitter to sign up, but suppose that could be beaten as well.

I too find that submitting is tedious, and like many I would rather spend time building sites, so the auto submit thing is awful tempting, however I am afraid I would end up being blacklisted everywhere.

Yep.. I could write a script that would "sign up" new accounts every day and then submit to them without any problem. Add a Captcha would slow me down, but I could just signup a few accounts manually every day.. or hire some cheap offshore guys to do it for pennies...