From: "Platonides" Platonides@gmail.com
On 10/04/2008, Simetrical wrote:
Not only is reCAPTCHA closed-source, it also adds a dependency on third-party servers. If their servers go down -- they might not be prepared for the load of a site like Wikipedia -- people presumably won't be able to log in, without expensive and unreliable uptime checks on our part. It adds another point of failure.
Probably. But the third party dependency can be avoided if we just provide their Audio captcha as an alternative to our FancyCaptcha. The number of queries to handle would be much lower, and if they went down, we would be exactly as now. However, they may not like being used for audio without filling in the text ones.
This sounds interesting because I am only interested in an audio CAPTCHA but not in reCAPTCHA's visual verification solution. Is it imaginable just to use their audio feature for Mediawiki/Wikipedia if they would provide it? If the answer is yes I will contact them, find out more and could try to convince.