2008/10/23 Zachary Goldberg zgold@bluesata.com:
Captchas in general are not so good, and there are much better anti-spam techniques out there (Such as asking an actual question. There are phpbb mods which allow you to input a list of questions (with perhaps links to wiki pages with answers) from which it'll chose a random one to present a user at registration. This is very simple for the user to get passed, just check the wiki for the answer to hopefully an obvious and perhaps informative question, and nearly impossible for the bots).
So perhaps ditching the captcha in favor of something less error prone is in order?
2008/10/23 Rosanne DiMesio dimesio@earthlink.net:
It took me about five tries to register for the forum several months ago. The reason is simple: aging eyesight. I have problems with captchas in general, but I have to say that some of the ones used for the forum are especially difficult to see because the background of the image also contains letters and number, and it is not always obvious which letters and numbers are supposed to be "right" ones.
Some captchas are really difficult to read (especially those with colors for people like me that are color blindless) but some other aren't. For exemple recaptchas [1] are easily readable. And it also helps archive.org digitalizing books. Perhaps switching to such a system will avoid crazy captchas and help people register onto the forum.
[1] http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
(Resending because I have again forgotten wine-devel ...)