Category: Zone BBS Suggestions and Feedback
Hello all, I heard a rumor recently that the zone is going to start to use captcha’s when a new member signs up. I was wondering if this was true and if its true how does everyone else feel about this topic?
Are you serious? Of all the sites that should not do this...
If I had been confronted with the challenge of having to read a captcha when I signed up four years ago, I wouldn't have bothered signing up.
it's no rumour you heard; kid! it's already being done. When I signed on there wasn't any captcha but I've got a friend who heard about this site from some email groups and he gave up signing up. He says there's audio for it but since he's using a Braille note he says he can't play the audio. I've never used a Braille note to access anything so I can't relate with what he's explaining. Besides he told me his old lady has an account on here so I told him to just use that. They don't go on the phone thing at all so who's gonna know! He says that's fine if he wants to look around but he'd rather go on as himself. I understand all that but what can I tell ye. Honestly you give some guys an inch and they want a fucking yard for crying out loud. Some people don't even think about what they got. Also what happens to those that can't play audio? If they don't have a sound card? If they have a Braille screen? Do we just say fuck them it's their problem? I think it's funny that a blind site uses captcha when for months now as I'm reading old messages since I wasn't here, people are talking about how they have problems with other websites with captcha. Maybe with putting that on here it will weed out the undesirables. Maybe once they see how much of a pain in the ass it is to get an account they'll give up and go to blind planet or something. You know, that site's slowly building and there's plenty of room for improvement and certainly lots of room for applications. So maybe you should tell your friends to forget the zone if they can't get in. Go there instead. If you look at www.blind-planet.com you'll see that as new as it is, it's growing. Maybe this is a chance for you to refer others. I have yet to set up my account there. I got an email inviting me over there but I deleted it. Maybe I'll just go there directly and set one up so I have one there and here too. So if it's too complicated getting on this site then forget it. Obviously they are not as open minded as they say. Think about it why would a site geared for blind people have captcha? Obviously to break your balls. Look, you have trouble with other sites using it, now you have that here. So forget about it. Find another community. There's plenty of disabled forms and chat things everywhere. Listen check out that other site there's no captcha there. They're also hooked up with talking communities so you can voice chat too. Then again if you can't do audio stuff, you're s.o.l. but still check it out. At least you know you can get in and you needn't wait a decade to be approved. Your application is instant and you can have as many as you want. All this was explained to me.
ewww capcha, all i gotta say
Wow are you serious? Why not do one of those captchas where it asks a question and you have to provide an answer. I heard about those somewhere.
I heard that it was considered in the new edition of the ADA to make a law against them, so maybe it won't last long.
as far as i know its just law to make them with audio. don't think theres an actual law against them now.
As long as they give the option of audio, I don't see the big deal. *Shrug*. I do agree that it's kind of amusing for this of all sites to have one, but it was never intended to be a 'blind site', even though it's ended up primarily that way.
I was bored and after reading the messages here I private quick noted people randomly and came up with a pretty good guess to why they're doing this captcha business. It's not official but it's food for thought. People are saying they think the reason why the captcha has been added for new applicants is to stop them from signing up behind a proxy. If someone has been band and they come back, usually they'll use a proxy to hide their ip. If you do some research you'll find plenty of proxies out there for accessing facebook and myspace. Apparently people get kicked from those too. There are also proxies for schools and work places where the access to the internet is limited and they have filters in place so to defeat them, they use proxies. Well unfortunately most of those things aren't set up for audio attachments. Some of them won't even let you download executables and other file extensions. Just strictly text only. So from what it looks like, people here must have a big problem where they are band and have to sneak back. So by appearances, I'd say that you have nothing to loose if you can't get on as any user. New or otherwise. Apparently for some people it's easy to slip up and be kicked off. Well most other communities are not like that. Most places people police themselves and they seem to exist with out someone intervening to play mom and dad. So once again, if it's that much work to get on here; don't!
just wondering however how did you find out this was happening? were you trying to help someone set up an account here? or did one of your friends bring it up to you.
Lets take a look at this from what I considder a fairly logical view point here shal we?
The 2 people that do the back / front end for this site are both blind. There not exactly going to implament something thats going to be inaccessable ae tey? unless there running out f bandwidth I guess, but thats doubtfull.
@9, Give me one example of a web proxy that defaults to text only and only serves stufflike html or php.
In short, I do not kno of any proxies that would not work with a capture.
And anyway even if someone did get band all they'd do is vpn someware and hay presto, different ip, different country etc.
I'd actually quite like to kno more about the hole banning thing really, considering that most ips are going to be dynamic these days unless you just have a really long lease and you get lucky and have the same address when you reconnect.
It may only be speculation. But if it's true, one would hope they'd use either an audio captcha or some form of textual confirmation.
sorry about the spelling in the above post, i'll proof read this one.
batteries running out on wireless keyboard. sorry again.
it's probably something that needed to be implemented, since there use to be so many fake accounts being set up. of course, having blind people as the majority, it would be stupid not to have the audio option available.
and, I know it's frustrating if people only access the net with braillenotes etc, but, these people have to realize these things need to be done to protect the net.
as far as the dinamic ip. I've had the same ip with adelphia for quite a few years. If it changed as much as all that it would screw me up. There's programs I use that remember me by my ip and saves lots of trouble that way. To the point that I prefer to use them here at home. Instead of at someone's house or rather. Skype remembers me when I click on to it. Echolink remembers me, and that about does it for the chat stuff. Dc ++ with some of the hubs I'm apart of remembers by ip even though some of the hubs say they don't require ip. Anyhow if there was a change like such, I'd have to resubmit my info to these things and it would be annoying since I forgot the passcodes to everything accept skype and zone. I could easily go and look but the ip recognition is definitely a lazy man's friend. I don't use proxies so can't answer what you asked about the audio and text. That there I'm repeating what I was told in a quick note. I said right out that these were guesses. So take them at face value if you may.
and don't worry about a remote keyboard. I have one and those things are nuts when they die or start dying. Just be sure it is not your only keyboard. Corded keyboards are important to keep if your cordless screws up
Some mentioned about this site being programmed by blind people. I gathered as much looking at it from the outside. In fact you needn't have an account to look. Just read on as it says to. Noticed there are not any graphics neither color schemes and you must refresh on your own. As most likely if it were to refresh for you at intervals it would probably mess up your screen reader. So this much they at least have taken in to consideration. Also with the audio captcha it's a good thing there isn't any deaf people present because then this site is the least their problems.
now that I think about it when you look at this site from outside it's kind of reminiscent to the way old bbs's were designed in the late seventy's and on. Sure miss those old systems as archaic as they were accept we didn't know it then. In 1976 I was 9 years old and the commodore were the best thing out. Didn't matter that you needed an entire pool table just to have room for everything that went with the machine. Who knew that eventually things would cocoon to such a degree as we know it now.
Ok all I would like to put my imput in here since well I'll explain.
I have this anoying hobby of randomly checking out people's profiles because I think reading profiles is fun. So i was looking at a bunch of the newwer profiles and saw that most were like the same. Like different countries or what ever but the same, and it went back for a long way in a simelar pattern looking like someone was having loads of fun so I brought it to the attention of a cl, and seriously people if people want to do stuff like that I think it needs captia, and there is a contact link on the front page so if a blind-deaf user wanted to sign up what's stopping them from sending Jj or chris an email telling them the problem. Or your friend with a braillenote for that matter. Just my thoughts.
good point candi, they'd have to email chris though cos we all know that Jay never answers his fucking emails hardly, lol.
alright then, all good points. So why not change the captia to one of those text question answer things? For example, merseymail.com uses them last time I looked.
"Solve the equasion"
(10-4)
That would be something to ask the powers that be. Chris?
i forgot there's ones where it'll ask you a question. Those are fine. I think some internet thing have ones like that to stop automatic spammers. Let's try it here
sure
But just saying "Solve the equation: 10-4 = <input type="text" name="equationAnswer" maxlength="1"></input>" won't work because an automated program could very easily solve that.
well you're not being tested for knowing the answer. Just that you're phisically there right? Otherwise why do it at all?
When i was looking at another website at the sign up page it had its terms of service. At the end it had some radio buttons with some statements. One of them was right and you had to read the terms to know which one. So maybe the zone could do something simmilar.
If you look at the rave board you can find a topick i created about olternatives to verifications or something like that. Maybe the zone could have something simmilar.
How clear is the audio. I know nothing can be worse than Hotmail's.
The one on the zone is the same they use at livejournal.
You can hear different numbers and also some other voices in reverce speaking. And also there are different voices saying each number. If you cannot understand one of the audios you can request a new cholenge. Better than hotmail but not very understandable.
the one on the zone is the same they use almost everywhere.
I'm a fan of reCAPTCHA because each time a person solves a captcha, it goes toward digitizing books.
You can read about that here: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Everybody loves books! I think that's the one they're using here, but I really didn't pay that much attention.
I know, this doesn't really pertain to the accessibility issue, but I still find it interesting.
The CAPTCHA is meant to keep automated scripts from registering accounts. We may consider switching to using text questions from the terms of service. Thanks for your comments.
Do what now? automated scripts from registering accounts? What's this now? Ok I can understand it if it were some kind of email thing sending out unwanted junk mail randomly but surely that does not happen here. Wow!
As far as I understand it, the purpose of a CAPTCHA is to ensure that a program is not filling in information at random. I could very easily create a JAWS script to create an account on the Zone if I felt like doing it (which I don't), and that is just one example of an automated program.
Automated scripts can happen anywhere.
Textual Confirmation questions are great. The sites that I've seen have a set number of questions (usually 4 or 5), and it rotates the questions in a random order, so there's no way to predict which question will come up.
i like the captia that sirius has. it's voice, but it's understandable
i can't stand them, one, they never seem to load on my systems, and second i have a hearing loss which makes it a lot harder for me to hear what is being said
ok here are my thoughts about this. I do understand the need for this site not to have automated scripts signing up, and I know how easy that would be to do. However, my system, for one, does not work with recaptcha's audio for some reason. It doesn't even work with gmail's. Don't ask me why, I haven't been able to figure that one out yet. I actually went to the registration page just to try it, and sure enough, it doesn't work. Now maybe if they had a download link, it would be a little easier, not to mention that it would play on any decent braille note. But that still doesn't solve the problem of deaf people or those who don't have a soundcard on their system. So what I think is that there should be a random question, one of maybe 20 or 30. I checked out blind planet's registration page, and when you refresh, it gives you random captchas. There's one that says "which word does not belong in the list," and then it gives a bunch of random words. Maybe if there was some kind of program to generate things like this it would work just fine, as a computer obviously couldn't solve something with no patern to it. Only a human would be able to do this. Another of their captchas is w"type the fourth word in the phrase 'this is a captcha sentence'", obviously that would not be the phrase. Generally it is some uncommon words that look like they are from a different language, or just randomly arranged letters perhaps. The other one they have is a math question in words. So that in itself would be difficult to solve since you would have to have a program to convert those numbers to digit form. So I think that if the zone had something like that, that was easily solvable but at the same time very difficult for a computer to solve, it would be fine. You could also have some sort of thing such as "which number is greater, five thousand six hundred fourty-nine, four thousand one hundred sixty-seven..." Etc. Further confusing any kind of program designed to convert numbers that are in word form. WHat do you all think about this?
looking at the registration page, I see that not only has the captcha not been removed, it is now not authorized for the zonebbs.com domain, meaning that it has been removed at recaptcha but not on the zone. So, the zone is esentially closed to new users until further notice, I guess.
if they can make the audio clear enough for us to understand, then I don't see the problem. also, the random question idea is a good one.