----- Original Message -----
From: "Ryan Kaldari" rkaldari@wikimedia.org
spambots. We just have to jump out of the existing captcha design band-wagon. Here are some ideas:
Surely we can come up with a creative idea that is:
- Easy for humans to solve
- Can't be solved by out-of-the-box captcha breakers
- Isn't trivial for programmers to solve
I would like to suggest a slight variant on something google's doing now, that I don't think they got quite right.
Pick half a dozen animals of which there are many specie variants, say, dog, cat, snake, bird, etc.
Show the user one such animal, and a 3x3 grid with 4 animals from that species, and 5 which are from the others, 64x64px ought to be plenty.
Ask them to click on all the animals of the same species. Assuming we can word that in a way that doesn't fail for people who don't know species are. Without losing the advantages of using pictures by *saying* "cat", that is.
The key here is to make the evaluation criteria sufficiently clear; the google implementation seems to require too much introspection into which characteristics of the pictured object they want you to match.
Once you've captcha'd then, you could, I would expect, put a cookie on the browser good for some amount of time and hashed against, say, the browser ID string or something so it's not portable?
Cheers, -- jra