David Gerard wrote:
On 5 February 2011 05:19, MZMcBride z@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