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ASCII Art CAPTCHA

 Easy to enter, easy to read
  (+4)
(+4) 		  [vote for,
against]

This ought to be really easy. The big issue that people seem to have is that the bandwidth taken up by this takes time/effort/annoys the hell out of people when they can't read it properly and have to re-enter it/take your pick of a reason to achieve.

I propose that as the swirly letters shown are often hard to read and consume all this bandwidth that they should be replaced by an ASCII Art version of the same, thereby giving the machines and bots that much harder a time of things (which is after all the principle of CAPTCHA) yet allowing us poor saps who get asked to type this thing in when confirming just about anything these days a halfway decent chance of actually getting it right first time!

As a plus it would also allow *nix users who still hanker after a command prompt to be able to use text-mode browsers still.

—ThicketTheories, Jul 07 2011

//What's twice the number of days in a week?// http://www.wolframa...r+of+days+in+a+week
[mouseposture, Jul 07 2011]

ASCII Art app http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIGlet
Now that I understand the idea, +. [Sir_Misspeller, Jul 08 2011]

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       I dunno... wouldn't an ASCII-art version be very easy for software to decode?   

       I've seen captchas which rely on natural language comprehension to answer. Such as "What's twice the number of days in a week" and the like. Harder to generate in bulk, I guess.
—MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 07 2011
   

       [MB] <link>
—mouseposture, Jul 07 2011
   

       Interesting site, [mouse], but no threat to captchas. I asked it "Do bears eat cheese?"; it interpreted my question as "Can you swim?" and replied "No I can't."
—MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 07 2011
   

       Well, do bears eat cheese ? they eat just about everything else, so the answer is most likely "yes".
—8th of 7, Jul 08 2011
   

       /and replied "No I can't."/   

       But are you a bear? I think Turing had some other less well known tests that could sort these things out.
—bungston, Jul 08 2011
   

       ASCII art can be used for more things than constructing large versions of ordinary alphanumeric characters. It can construct actual images. I suspect a ""bot" would have a much more difficult time interpreting the image, than it would have interpreting ASCII constructs of ordinary alphanumeric characters. And the main advantage remains, in that ASCII art consumes a lot less bandwidth than, say, a .GIF image.
—Vernon, Jul 08 2011
   

       I read somewhere that porn sites serve up the captchas from secure sites, for customers to solve in return for "free" porn. Which I thought was a wonderful approach to cloud sourcing, even if it pretty much destroys the whole purpose of captchas.
—DrCurry, Jul 09 2011
   


 

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