Impossible CAPTCHA : It Doesn’t Really Matter if You are Human or Not

52 Comments

1. Just gread – love those with the big math challenge.

2. Ann,

   Funny gallery of impossible CAPTCHAs. I did a post on this exact topic back in December title Is Your CAPTCHA Killing Your Business?

   Definitely the CAPTCHA is one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to usability.

   Thanks for the amusing post. 🙂

3. Ann, this is an awesome killer post… had 7 retweets of my tweet within minutes 🙂

   Cheers,christoph

4. The last mathematical capture is probably 0. Since inserting the value of pi for x gives numerical values for sin and cos not terms in x. And partial differential a number w.r.t. x is 0.

   P.S. The 2nd character in the 3d. landscape looks like an N to me.

   Nice capcha examples, great post.

5. Whoops my mistake. x=Pi is after the partial differentiation.

6. 480.

7. Ann!
   I’m surprised to your finds again and again.
   They looks so simple but very interesting.
   I think that is a really killer post.
   Twitit and bookmark it on Delicious.

8. 42!

9. I got number 5 its one of those magic eyes
   it says 438
   magic eyes are fun but not everyone can do them…not so good for business…lol

10. Hi Ann,

    Hysterical! Thanks so much for finding these. Given our line of work, I’m always collecting funny and impossible CAPTCHAs. The Matrix stream and 3D terrain are among my new favorites!

    You’re also right that it doesn’t matter if it’s a human or bot doing the submitting, but not necessarily because the puzzles are too complex. In the past few years spammers and hackers have started hiring teams of workers to submit spam/abuse to Web forms for pennies (even for forms that don’t use any kind of CATPCHA).

    If it’s humans submitting spam anyway, why bother trying to distinguish computers from humans? Ah, the irony. 😉

    Thanks for a fun post!

11. The formula on know your 123 is 6. Wolfram Alpha has a use afterall. 🙂

12. Hey Ann! Would love to post this directly into facebook… where is your facebook app? ShareThis is really exceptional for ease of posting 🙂

13. Wow what an unusual collection. I have never come across most of these captures before – very amusing!

14. I have a more interesting captcha, I hope.

    Try a few times, the animals change:

    http://tools.lbi-netrank.co.uk/density-engine/?url=seosmarty.com

15. What a funny article! But I like it very much. Would let me introduce it on my blog(Japanese)? I’m sure to give credit to you and put a link to the post there.

16. What a funny article! But I like it very much. Would you let me introduce it on my blog(Japanese)? I’m sure to give credit to you and put a link to the post there.

17. these are great – never could see the hidden code

18. @Manley, yeah, yours looks great! But it is not impossible though 🙂

    @Kenichi, sure, no problem

19. Are you kidding?

    Who can read those.

    On a more serious point… do you think that adding a captcha stops people from responding.

    I know it only takes a few seconds to type in an easy to read one, but I’m sure some people can’t be bothered and your website misses a potential sale or contact.

    Thanks for the examples.

    Bill

20. i had faced many probs filling CAPTCHA its really an eye teaser..

21. @Bill, the short answer is “yes” – CAPTCHA does provide some usability challenge. Unfortunately, we seldom can get along without it. A good way out is to make it entertaining like the one linked to in the comment above:
    http://tools.lbi-netrank.co.uk/density-engine/?url=seosmarty.com

22. There may be a fun marketing angle here, especially for small niches. Especially if these form submissions wouldn’t be for lead submissions from potential customers.

    Maybe registering for an event would require a fun or specific question. An example would be an elite math club might require an equation to be solved.

23. Ironic that the first post I read on Sphinn is this – registering with that site required a simple sum AND a character captcha and was so unclear it took 3 attempts to get past!

24. That’s too funny. I understand CAPTCHAs are necessary, but some of them are hard to read!!! Hopefully someone can come with a decoder ring or some glasses for them soon.

25. In the meanwhile I am using Twitter’s CAPTCHAs to name the songs on my upcoming album.

    Annoying or not they are already a part of our life 🙂

26. There is very interesting, there is very fun.

27. This is a GOOD one Ann! SOme of these they are coming up with will make you crosseyed. 😎

28. I got number 5 its one of those magic eyes
    it says 438
    magic eyes are fun but not everyone can do them…not so good for business…lol

29. Its a thin line between stopping your hassle and killing any user interaction completely. Comments and signups cannot be without any work or moderation can they, thats life!

30. Cool! I saw the CAPTCHA Cats. It’s in Rapidshare.com, but their deactivated it. I believe that was because of the difficulty!

31. LOL these are just too funny – thanks a lot for the list.

32. Most of them cannot be passed, I suppose

33. So true.. I have been fighting with my dev team on removing captcha from landing pages too.. I told them I myself have hard time reading it.. but they think tht am just making it up.. neways..

    things apart.. i loved that u have a category called SEO Ethics.. 😛 Kudos for that

34. So true…I recently was requesting service from a website and I could not get the captcha to work. After leaving with a serious ding to my self esteem (turns out I’m not human). I emailed them. Never heard a response, guess I will go with someone else.

35. Hey Ann,

    Such good finds. =)

    These captcha’s are really very impossible most of the times… It’s actually sometimes becoming irritating.

    Another one good post from you.

    Thanks!

36. The cats one is easy.

    But I simply cannot do the Magic Eye things. Never could.

37. This CAPTCHA is impossible. This is very bad for site.

38. i lived a very bad day because the first captcha you mentioned (that one of the cats) .it used on rapidshare i have to download a very important file to complete my research. and my supervisors keep asking about the results and i spend the whole day tring to solve this captcha with no hope until i called the lap in the uk to send me another copy of the file
    if i can catch the developer who developed this captcha i would kill him.lol

39. Good Stuff. Some hard to read Captchas are so very annoying.

40. I’ve come across some like this including ones that were in letters and sybols. Some I didn’t even have on my keyboard

41. Funny Post…

    The one that looks like a calculus captcha is nuts! I have seen something similar trying to joining a money forum, but that’s beyond what I experienced there.

42. You know what’s interesting? Captcha is designed to not be passable by a computer (hence how it tests your human-ness) and yet the computer must know the answer as it is the very thing that is assessing your Captcha test. In case you’re curious I wrote a post about the philosophy of Captcha here http://endofthegame.net/2011/10/03/humans-and-computers-are-you-a-bot/
    Let me know what you think!

43. My problem is that when it is straightforward to copy, the app itself malfunctions, too often. Reading it correctly can be one challenge.
    But when the combination of Arabic numerals and Capital letters is plain and unadorned and multiple tries still don’t work, it’s a common malfunction of a badly coded app.
    I tried last night to Contact Us to let them know that Captcha wasn’t working on their Site. Captcha blocked my letter of complaint about it.

44. An impossible captcha proves to me the site only cares more about it’s few loyal readers then it does of capturing new audiences.

    I give the friendly back arrow a hard click and make a note of myself never to visit any blog that is hosted by that site.

    For example Soft Pedia has an impossible captcha asking you to solve an equation but then there is another number that has nothing attached to it that I don’t know what it’s there for unless I am not seeing something.

45. Instead of making any real effort to stop spam the US Democrats just want to take freedom away by robbing Peter to pay Paul while turning a blind eye to the real problems.

    Saturday Night Live which usually is a Liberal show actually made fun of Hillary Clinton non stop for several hours having entire specials about her to make her look stupid.

    One of the Conservative talk shows mentioned it and I couldn’t stop laughing.

46. I have entered Microsoft’s captcha enough times to circle the earth. It seems case sensitive, then not, so I give the audio a try-again, apparently I am hard of hearing-not-or amazingly dense-again, not.
    My question is how to determine what M. is after. Case sensitive? Random? Good luck?
    Or Good riddance!
    Many thanks,
    Laurel

47. solving very difficult capchas have been my favourite online puzzles, but these ones prove nearly imposible.

48. The worst ones yet are FUncaptchas, they are total 8HITE!!

49. Pingback: 7 Web Form Optimization Insights from Testing Hundreds of Forms

50. The hidden code in the picture is 438.
    There are 4 cats in the words
    UNBK in the 3d words?
    As for the others, my guess is as good as yours.