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brokensites
Former Member
Message 1 of 2

SiteAdvisor Captcha verification does not work

The problem reported in the Original Post is still present for me.

"So I have tried numerous times to get my site verified and submitted and getting increasingly frustrated.

1: Submit a site for review and me and my friends have all tried this and we all keep getting the same error: "The string you entered for the image verification did not match what was displayed."

"

The image verification mechanism appears broken for site advisor. Please could ypou fix it, preferably provide an alternative method for verification as these anti-spam methods are most frustrating.

Thanks,

yet another frustrated user

1 Reply
Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 2 of 2

Re: SiteAdvisor Captcha verification does not work

This deserves its own thread, because the problem is being reported from all over. I even reported it myself. I don't know what's broken, but something is, and I wish they'd r*ddy well fix it.

Edit : I followed this up with an item added to the next conference call, and also with a little research. According to the official Captcha site at http://www.captcha.net/

There are many CAPTCHA implementations, some better than others.

The implementation on the SiteAdvisor page looks like a customised Captcha implementation. It's nothing like the reCaptcha I've seen and used in a hundred other places without any problems.

Official Captcha version :

SiteAdvisor page (Reviewer sign-up)

SiteAdvisor page (Request A Review)

Captcha 1 (SA).PNG

The one used on the SiteAdvisor pages does not comply with Accessibility guidelines -

  • Accessibility.    CAPTCHAs must be accessible. CAPTCHAs based solely on reading text — or other visual-perception tasks — prevent visually impaired users from accessing the protected resource. Such CAPTCHAs may make a site incompatible with Section 508 in the United States. Any implementation of a CAPTCHA should allow blind users to get around the barrier, for example, by permitting users to opt for an audio or sound CAPTCHA.

If they've made their own, that is generally not recommended.

  • Building a secure CAPTCHA code is not easy. In addition to making the images unreadable by computers, the system should ensure that there are no easy ways around it at the script level.

  • Should I Make My Own CAPTCHA? In general, making your own CAPTCHA script (e.g., using PHP, Perl or .Net) is a bad idea, as there are many failure modes. We recommend that you use a well-tested implementation such as reCAPTCHA.

    And if they've gone for a free non-standard alternative that's probably a mistake too.

    Most CAPTCHA scripts found freely on the Web are vulnerable to these types of attacks

    The implementation being used here is also classed as Broken because the text in the image is not always sufficiently distorted to fool an OCR.

    • Image Security. Images of text should be distorted randomly before being presented to the user. Many implementations of CAPTCHAs use undistorted text, or text with only minor distortions. These implementations are vulnerable to simple automated attacks. For example, the CAPTCHAs shown below can all be broken using image processing techniques, mainly because they use a consistent font.
    • _broken-captchas.png'

    So all in all I think the SiteAdvisor Captcha section is a headache-inducing poorly-implemented second-rate copy of the genuine article and should be replaced. But that, of course, is just my own personal opinion. Maybe it works fine for most people but my browser settings/cookies/cache/network connection/firewall/whatever is the reason why it doesn't work fine for me

    References :

    http://www.captcha.net/

    http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

    Section 508 (Accessibilty)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973

    http://www.hhs.gov/web/508/


    Message was edited by: Hayton on 19/10/13 18:00:06 IST
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