Captcha hard to read?

[Yodaya]

Hi guys,

received several complaints by visitors to my site:

http://www.all-blogs.net

that the captcha image when submitting a site to my directory ist really difficult to read ....

Did you get similar complaints from your visitors??

Is there a way to make the images better readable????


Cheers

Yodaya

[David]

I'm with you on that one. I would love to know difficult it would be do things like:
1) Change the fonts that are use
2) Limit certain characters that look similar such as 0 and O, or g and 9.

[Yodaya]

Hi David,

let's see if someone in the fourm knows how to solve this issue...

Cheers

Yodaya

[achafik]

Hello, here are some things to do to make it easier to read...

Open "libs/captcha/captcha.class.php"
First: Here is a fix to make sure that the text doesn't overlap-
Around line 256 Find: Content visible to registered users only. Replace With: Content visible to registered users only. The Line Before Add: Content visible to registered users only. No More Overlapping Text!

Second: Give the text more room (Helps keep text IN the image [on the x plane])
Around line 241 Find: Content visible to registered users only. Replace With: Content visible to registered users only.Zip:

{url no longer in service}

Let me know if this helps :)

[David]

Very Nice Work...I'm going to add this to the fixes for the final release as well.

[Valtar]

Sweet,

Thanks achafik... sometimes you guys just amaze me.

[David]

Content visible to registered users only.

They amaze me too. We have some really awesome supporters here. We will go far if we can maintain the momentum.

[barryb]

I upgraded the Captcha class and fonts, but I still find it very difficult to read. Is there another fix? This phpBB forum uses a very legible security image, as does a WordPress plugin ( {url no longer in service} ). In addition to being much more legible, these other two systems use much smaller gifs which seem to load faster and take up less space. Any thoughts?? Thanks!

[David]

Yes, barryb, I think we might end up going with a system similar to wordpress or phpbb in the future, especially in light of the common problem of people not having Free Font compiled in their GD.

[cvos]

i have to concur on the readability of the capcha image. its definitely a roadblock to signups.

This image a competitor uses is really nice, and only 4 characters, which poses almost no usability problems and keeps the 'bots away.

{url no longer in service}

this one looks pretty good (a bit long though)

{url no longer in service}

[dcb]

cvos, the CAPTCHAs that you pointed out are mostly useless since they can be beaten very easy by specialized scripts, also the phpBB CAPTCHA. But using the other link that barryb posted I came across interesting info and made some changes to the CAPTCHA scripts. They are more readable now but hopefully harder to crack. Anyway without GD and FreeType any text based CAPTCHA doesn't stand a chance.

[cvos]

i think that for this script, we're not worried about hackers figuring out the captcha. Its a very low priority target, and i would consider it a mere annoyance if someone figured out how to automaticallly spam my directory. its just not worth it.

here is a cool implementation:

{url no longer in service}

[kickass]

If you are going to implement a new captcha font could you please get rid of the 0 and O and o within the font??? Hard to tell apart, aren't they? My friends who tried out the script complained about this one the loudest.

[David]

I'm working on getting a better captcha now.
Hopefully, I'll have something for us shortly.