On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:46 PM, Bawolff Bawolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This question
is something we've also been asking ourselves on the E3
team,
as part of our work on account creation. I think
we all agree that
CAPTCHAs
are at best a necessary evil. They are a
compromise we make in our user
experience, in order to combat automated attacks.
That's kind of missing the point of the original poster. The point being
that they are an *un*nessary evil and do not prevent automated attacks
whatsoever.
[Snip]
We actually don't know that, and "whatsoever" is probably a gross
exaggeration.
To get more
numbers on how much taking away the CAPTCHA might gain us in
terms of human registrations, we have considered a two hour test (to
start
with) of removing the CAPTCHA from the
registration page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Account_creation_UX/CAPTCHAThat
kind of test would probably not be an accurate measurement of what kind
of
spam would be unleashed if we permanently removed
it, but the hourly
volume
of registrations on enwiki is enough to tell us
the human impact.
That would be interesting. Remember that captchas arent just on the user
reg page though.
-bawolff
Yeah I would prefer we only test removal on the registration page.
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