Yikes! AltaVista's free site submission, hard?

Robot prevention image check is very hard

[androidtech]

Has anybody tried to use AltaVista's free site submission web page lately?

[addurl.altavista.com...]

They've adopted the Verisign style "enter the characters in the image" entry check, as an attempt to defeat robots using their service.

Unfortunately, at least for me, the image was so hard to read it took me over 6 tries to get an image that I could recognize and enter properly.

Anybody else experienced this?

The biggest problem is not being able to tell if a letter is capitalized or not, especially with vertically and horizontally symmetrical letters.

thx

[BlueSky]

Yes, I've had problems on those codes too on sites that do the same as AV, don't use enough contrast between the background and font, or pick ones where it's hard to tell which character it is. I bet the webmasters often mistaken multiple failed attempts as bots instead of humans giving up.

[killroy]

I love the gigablast check though ;)

SN

[androidtech]

killroy,

It says that features is "temporarily disabled" (add url).

Is that the check? :)

[ronburk]

I used it within the last few weeks. Took me 4 tries to get my one little home page added. Seemed to always offer me something that had a "i" or an "l" in it, and I had to flat-out guess which was which.

[PatrickDeese]

> Has anybody tried to use AltaVista's free site submission web page lately?

Lately? It has had that check for a couple of years, at least.

2001 forum post [webmasterworld.com]

[takagi]

killroy
I love the gigablast check though ;)

SN

---

androidtech
killroy,

It says that features is "temporarily disabled" (add url).

Is that the check? :)

Gigablast sometimes temporarily disables the 'Add Url' function, but that's not the check. Since September 6, there is a kind of Turing test where you have to enter 4 (capital) letters for every URL you want to add.

Foiling the Addurl Scripts
September 6, 2003

The new pseudo-Turing test on the addurl page should prevent most automated scripts from submitting boatloads of URLs. If someone actually takes the time to code a way around it then I'll just have to take it a step further. I would rather work on other things, though, so please quit abusing my free service and discontinue your scripts. Thanks.

Gigablast - Rants & Raves [gigablast.com]

[pleeker]

Lately? It has had that check for a couple of years, at least.

That's true, but androidtech is right that it's gotten ridiculous lately -- the fonts are unreadable more often than not. Is that a 'q'? Maybe a 'g'? Just awful........

[PatrickDeese]

I don't know. they look *exactly* like the same ones they've always had, black letters on beige background, "ransom note" style.

They have always been hard since they started this method.

In fact, if I am not mistaken, AV was the first place I ever saw this graphical human interaction type of confirmation.

[isorg]

After AV, it started appearing on sign-ups to forums. Yesterday I saw such a thing on GoDaddy.com's Whois lookup to prevent robots harvesting email addresses. Pretty smart I thought, why can't my registrar (OpenSRS) do the same...?!?!

[killroy]

The ironic thing is that the ransom ote is EASIER to decode programatically (by simply trying and recording all images) then it is to decode for a human.

All power to the robots ;)

SN