On 3/20/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Theresa Knott wrote:
Take the second letter of ADAM, the first letter of OGRE and the last of RAINING.
Is it possible for a bot to get around that?
In a word, yes. Unless you want to try coming up with new and interesting variations faster than the bots can be taught to parse them.
And I bet if you give that captcha to enough humans, enough will fail for things to get very tense very quickly. "What do you mean take the second letter? What do I do with it? I just want to help with wikibooks!!!"
Mind you, graphical captchas can get beaten too, unless they're done very carefully.
Perhaps if linkspam is the problem, we should just implement severe restrictions on including URLs? It's hard to imagine many situations where a new editor with almost no editors is adding a really useful URL that complies with [[WP:External links]]. And is there a reason Wikipedia doesn't use Google's suggested "nofollow" tag?
Steve