“And everybody get CAPTCHA… ” 

Am I the only one who tends to overthink a CAPTCHA? The site will be telling you to select all the motorbikes and now you’re stuck because the edge of the wheel is spilling into the next box. Even those captchas that tell you to type what you see – Madam, I don’t know if that’s a ‘g’ or a ‘b’, please please. I might actually need glasses. 

Fun fact: The average time it takes to complete a Captcha is 10 seconds. 

CAPTCHA is used to tell the difference between humans and robots. It does this by providing a challenge that computers will find very difficult to perform (supposedly). However, as computers became even more powerful, they were able to figure out what the distorted texts said. This caused sites to make captchas even harder *sigh*, as if the ones they’re doing now aren’t hard enough. There was a study conducted that showed that computers had a better pass rate than humans. This is where Google stepped in and made things easier by creating reCAPTCHA, which is just a tick box asking if you’re not a robot. But how does ticking a box let the site know that “I’m not a Robot?”. 

Well, there are other factors that determine if you’re a human such as site cookies and IP addresses, these provide evidence that you are human. Another factor is that the site monitors how your cursor moves, the way humans move a mouse is different to how a bot moves. The website also looks at how long you spend to figure out if that image is a traffic light or not. Because for a bot, this task can be completed before you can even blink. Bots struggle to emulate how us humans behave (for now), which is why reCAPTCHA is working so far. 

Meanwhile, sites often used captcha as a deterrent. In this day and age, we want the ability to complete tasks in the fewest clicks. By sites adding this extra step it prevents users from, for example, adding multiple reviews or signing up multiple times to get a free sample. However, there are downsides to using captchas. It is hard for people that use accessibility tools on their devices to get through the process, which can make it extra frustrating. 

There are different types of captcha methods. I noticed whilst out in Japan that they used math equations instead of selecting images, no wonder they’re miles ahead of everyone else. But I can’t lie, after a long day, I’m not trying to do BODMAS. Whereas, TikTok have developed a fun method by asking the user to drag the puzzle piece into place. In summary, I do think websites need to find a method of making captchas easy for us users, whilst also making it difficult enough for the bots to get past the captchas.  

I’ll give a prize to anyone that can figure out the CAPTCHA below (This is actually a real captcha) … 

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Love & Guidance 

TT