On 31 July 2012 13:53, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 30 July 2012 15:22, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/07/12 15:28, Pau Giner wrote:
From the UX perspective, a captcha is always an obstacle for the interaction flow.
I agree. But when you're spammed to death if there's no captcha, you end up accepting it as a necessary evil.
Just to jump in here, it's not actually clear that our CAPTCHAs work at all at this point (per Tim's e-mail from last year of being able to robotically break ours 75% of the time).
On https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development (created last week), we in WMF Engineering noted that we'd want to look properly at some data around these CAPTCHAs and how they're working. This might show us that it would be sensible to just turn them off (which of course would help usability for all users), as long as we're happy that the tools for preventing the vandalism they were intended to stop are working well.
Yours,
Putting on my checkuser hat for a moment - yes, please please look at finding a different CAPTCHA process - the cross-wiki spamming by bots that are able to "break" the CAPTCHA is becoming overwhelming. This issue has been reported separately, and there may be a different fix, but this is a pretty big deal as a few hundred volunteer hours a month are going into the despamming effort.
Risker/Anne