If you are more or less actively using the Internet in everyday work, then you probably know about such an unpleasant thing, which is captcha. Sometimes it interferes with the work so much that people often simply stop visiting those sites whose owners give her too much attention.
What it is?
By the way, what is captcha? Imagine that you went to some popular file hosting service. To download a file in free mode, you will have to enter in a special field a certain set of characters (often meaningless), which should be taken from the opposite picture.
The task is complicated by the fact that these symbols are sometimes completely impossible to make out, since they are deliberately made unreadable.
What is it for?
Having understood what a captcha is, it would be nice to talk about its specific purpose. Why do you need to fence such a garden, making it difficult to send comments or download files?
Yes, there were times when no one knew about captcha at all. She appeared relatively recently. This happened at the same time when a lot of bots bred on the Runet, with the help of which enterprising citizens left advertisements in the comments, downloaded files for free and created other outrages.
Of course, on many resources, administrators kept order, but in most blogging services, the load on them was such that they simply stopped coping. That's when users learned what captcha is! Acquaintance was quite unpleasant.
To be quite accurate, the technology itself was originally created in 2000. Initially, it was intended only to determine the “humanity” of your interlocutor on the Internet: then no program for captcha (to recognize it, more precisely) was simply created.
What is its drawback?
If you carefully read the first part of the article, then you can guess yourself most of the negative factors of using captcha. Firstly, most users act in a state of some kind of impulse. Simply put, when you see some interesting post in the same LJ, you want to comment on it right away.
Just before you get an indigestible captcha, and most of the characters are so illegible that it can take more than one day to solve them. Do you think the user will do such an ungrateful thing?
Of course not! He just goes to another site. Thus, if you are trying to protect your resource from fans of leaving spam in the comments, we advise you not to be too zealous.
If you are too keen on captcha, quickly lose many active users. No users - no money from advertising. In addition, most of the normal resources automatically recognize comment spam, so there is often no sense in additional protection.
Almost the same can be said of file sharing sites. Of course, you can understand their creators: by offering everyone and free to download information of interest, they simply miss the profit.
But you can look at the same situation from the exact opposite side: if a site offers you the opportunity to receive a file for free, it will easily gain a huge audience that will quickly pay back all costs by attracting advertisers. By the way, this is exactly how the domestic iFolder acts, the creators of which definitely cannot complain about poverty.
So, even from the point of view of making a profit, the idea of captcha does not look so attractive.
What to do?
And how to remove captcha, is it really possible to do this? Here the situation is rather ambiguous. The fact is that on many sites that use this type of anti-spam protection, not every user can read the captcha the first time, not to mention some applications.
Simple options can be recognized with the help of a small utility Screenshot Reader, which is part of the ABBYY FineReader software package. But she reads only the simplest forms of captcha, which can be easily recognized by any normal user. In addition, the process itself will not be able to be automated, since for recognition it is necessary to manually select the range of interest to you.
Enter captcha
If you don’t have much choice, you will have to do this thankless job manually. What advice can be given? First, try to do it faster: on many sites there is a counter that resets the value if you cannot enter it within a couple of minutes.
In addition, errors in writing characters often occur when JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Do not forget about the need for cookies, as they will help the site to "recognize you", eliminating the constant passage of boring protection.
Finally, pay attention to what is written on the main page of the site. As a rule, captcha for a site is described in detail in an explanatory note or a separate article. A great example is the file sharing service Rapidshare, which at one time introduced a unique captcha.
Its symbols were easily distinguishable; no blurring or polarization technologies were used that would impede the work of programs for recognizing it. What was the secret?
And it consisted in the fact that cats were sitting on the letters and numbers that had to be entered in the appropriate field. How many unpleasant words were said at the time to the creators of such a system! In the end, it was abandoned under pressure from the user community.
We buy the "antidote"
Another option is to contact a normal programmer (or a group, which is even better), so that he makes a utility for recognizing captcha on a specific site. Alas, universal solutions do not exist, if only because the protection is unique on each resource. Some typical solutions are very rare.
Of particular interest in this regard are the development of CMS Bitrix, which distributes truly effective programs that handle captcha on most popular sites. The developers claim that the effectiveness of their creation is within 95%. Depending on the type of protection, its complexity and the specific site, the development of methods for its protection can cost you a couple of thousand dollars, or even more.
In addition, some resources have such sophisticated protection that it is not easy for a person to solve it!
Is it possible to capitalize on its input?
Beginners are often interested in whether it is possible to somehow earn money by entering protective characters. And this is not surprising, because the Internet is full of announcements about a set of groups of people who will receive some money by performing captcha recognition. Should I get involved with this?
In our opinion (perhaps quite subjective), it is not worth doing this business. You will spend a huge amount of nerves, strength and traffic. And paying for such an “easy money” is simply amazing: after sitting around the computer all day, manic persisting in driving captcha, you will earn a maximum of a couple of dollars. Do you need it? Surely not.
Universal output
If we talk about file hosting, then in the event that you regularly upload files, the only reliable way out of the situation is to buy a paid account. As a rule, its cost is quite adequate. Having bought such a subscription, you will be able to quickly and without inconvenience download any amount of information.
How to remove captcha from your blog?
We hope that you have made the right conclusions by reading most of our article. Therefore, we will consider how to remove captcha input on the popular Blogger service from the notorious Google company. It is not difficult to do this, and you will bring a lot of joy to visitors to your site.
First, go to the "Editor" of your page. In the left column, select "Settings". It has a section "Messages and comments." In the Use word-by-word check box, set the value to “no”, after which captcha will not be required when entering messages.
What if I can’t enter it correctly?
It happens that the program for entering captcha or the site itself (if you enter the values manually) constantly gives an error. What could be the reason?
First of all, you need to calm down. As a rule, on the right side of any captcha there is a curved arrow. By clicking on it, you will update the character set that you need to enter to access the site. Using it, you can change a completely unreadable set. Unfortunately, unreadable letters are very common. So, sometimes the difference between the letters "Q" and "G" is completely indistinguishable.
Finally, on many sites, you can avoid entering security characters by simply registering with it. Try this one too.
That's what a captcha is!