David Gerard wrote:
On 5 February 2011 05:19, MZMcBride
<z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
This is the subject of bug 5309, "Localize
captcha images":
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5309
This is the subject of bug 14230, "Add a button to request a new fancy
captcha (code)":
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14230
Generally it's a good idea to search Bugzilla before mailing this list. More
often than not, Bugzilla will contain the relevant problem and a discussion
of it.
This comes across as dismissive. Saying "we have old bugs filed that
no-one is working on" is not a reason to dismiss discussion of a real
problem. Tim has noted how badly our captcha solutions suck.
My intention wasn't to come across as dismissive. On the other hand, if
people begin new conversations without having read the old conversations, it
sets back progress dramatically. The opening post didn't make any mention of
the old bugs or their progress, so I was trying to point out that these
issues were already known and there were already forums in which they could
and should be discussed.
David Gerard (also) wrote:
(It's a real pity reCaptcha is third-party and
proprietary.)
I think it's a real pity that CAPTCHAs are needed at all. They're a
pain-in-the-ass and their effectiveness against coordinated or sophisticated
attacks is dubious at best.
Diederik van Liere wrote:
Isn't this a nice gsoc 2011 project?
Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2011 should go here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2011/Project_ideas
Platonides wrote:
I agree. Some captchas are quite bad.
Occasionally the CAPTCHA will create offensive combinations, which are a bit
worse than double Es and the like. ;-) This is the subject of bugs 10408,
16166, and 21025.
Alex wrote (referring to a GSOC project involving better CAPTCHA support):
Probably not. All you need is a word list for each
language. As long as
you have a font that supports the characters, there aren't any major
issues that would prevent you from generating non-English captchas. Bug
5309 points out a couple minor issues with the captcha script. You may
have to generate word lists for some languages, but I doubt that would
take all summer. It's just a matter of someone sitting down and doing it.
There's certainly a right balance to be struck between projects that are far
too large and complex (and thus never get finished) and projects that are
too small and get finished within a day or two. Personally, I'd much rather
have a bunch of small projects get finished (and re-worked as necessary)
than have one large project get started, but never finished (LiquidThreads,
interwiki transclusion, etc.).
If you looked at all of the CAPTCHA-related bugs as a group (including
possibly removing the Python dependency), there's more than enough to be at
least considered for Summer of Code 2011.
MZMcBride