New generation of captcha



  •  first off, TRWTF is me for actually realizing that I should've made a screenshot about 1.24 seconds after hitting the "submit" button.

    now that I made this clear:

    I was writing a post on escapist forums, where it sometimes makes you do the captcha to allow you to submit the post. And it made me do it. Except this one was special, maybe "sponsored" by some company, I'm really not sure which?

    It looked like this:

    Except under the logo there was a red text saying: "Describe this brand with a suitable word(s)".

    I was not sure whether it's part of the captcha, and I should write exact and entire text I see, or I should really follow the in-image instructions, so I went for the latter. I wrote "naval". It was accepted as a correct answer. I'm a little confused as to who's the exceptionally smart guy here: the captcha itself, for recognizing my input was correct, kinda, in a way, me, for writing the only word/one of few words the captcha was prepared to accept, or escapist/reCaptcha staff, for putting advertisment in there, and ignoring the user input on it?


  • Considered Harmful

    Maybe they were subtly soliciting feedback to get what impression the brand makes on customers, especially if they can correlate it with other demographic information they collect about you.



  • You know how you always hear people talk about "market research"?

    This is it.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Filed under: ratings are just spyware in your cable box

     

    Hilarious story about that: for a brief window of time, my family was given a Nielsen transponder. This was how they used to track TV ratings before cable boxes that automatically recorded viewing habits were universal. They used this data to record the average American family's viewing habits.

    We lost it after about three weeks because our viewing habits weren't average enough.

     



  • @curtmack said:

    @MiffTheFox said:

    Filed under: ratings are just spyware in your cable box

     

    Hilarious story about that: for a brief window of time, my family was given a Nielsen transponder. This was how they used to track TV ratings before cable boxes that automatically recorded viewing habits were universal. They used this data to record the average American family's viewing habits.

    We lost it after about three weeks because our viewing habits weren't average enough.

     

    Yeah they get scared that you will skew the numbers when you watch for equally long periods Playboy Channel and Pride Tv. Other suspect tv habits:

    • Watching BET but not OWN
    • Watching Military Channel and PBS
    • Watching MTV, CMT and HisChannel
    • Watching Fox News


  • Was it Brand Tags?

    These guys did a pitch at my group before, I didn't see much value in it.



  • It's from [url]http://www.solvemedia.com/[/url]. They were even featured in a main page article: [url=http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Captchad--Do-Not-Complain.aspx]Captcha'd - Do Not Complain[/url]

    I doubt those things actually work as captchas though. They seem easy to bypass. They're really disguised advertisements.



  • You should answer them all "penis", and see if the website decides to psychoanalyze you!



  • @ekolis said:

    You should answer them all "penis", and see if the website decides to psychoanalyze you!
     

    I should make random crap threads more often in here just to be able to watch where the discussion steers to.



  • @spamcourt said:

    They're really disguised advertisements.
     

    last two I got (not counting this one) were "way to go, Dave!" and "good morning!".

    Makes sense, I guess. Tomorrow I'll go the Dave way and buy a whole cart of good morning.

     

    (Also, yes, SolveMedia, not reCaptcha, so much for me not remembering and trying to assume it was the most commonly used one that I can remember.)



  • @curtmack said:

    cable boxes that automatically recorded viewing habits
     

    That sounds scary. Luckily I don't have cable (I'm one of the ~35% of Australians who can actually get actual cable but I choose not to pay the outrageous amount that Foxtel charges).



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    i'll try the penis thing next time...
    /** TODO: write funny comment */

     



  • @curtmack said:

    @MiffTheFox said:

    Filed under: ratings are just spyware in your cable box

     

    Hilarious story about that: for a brief window of time, my family was given a Nielsen transponder. This was how they used to track TV ratings before cable boxes that automatically recorded viewing habits were universal. They used this data to record the average American family's viewing habits.

    We lost it after about three weeks because our viewing habits weren't average enough.

     

    We had one of those for about 5 years. I completely took the piss (whole family + a dozen guests logged in to watch Red Dwarf at 2am on a Tuesday night), and they never did anything.

    Given that there were 500 of these boxes for the country, you could see the impact in the ratings for less popular shows.

    Oh, and they had a ratings system: if you rated a program before it ended, your viewing was weighted appropriately (i.e. watching a program you loved for an hour = watching a program you hated for 1.n hours).

    I tended not to believe tv ratings after that.



  • @boba_fett said:

    We had one of those for about 5 years. I completely took the piss (whole family + a dozen guests logged in to watch Red Dwarf at 2am on a Tuesday night), and they never did anything.

    Ignoring for a moment that I have no clue what "took the piss" means (and I assume don't want to know)... you woke up like 16 people to watch a show at 2am thinking that your Nielson box would... what? Magically produce a new season of the show the next week? Or what?

    Nielson is the best troll.

    @boba_fett said:

    I tended not to believe tv ratings after that.

    You should see the numbers newspapers and radio stations give advertisers. At least TV numbers are in the realm of possibility.



  • @boba_fett said:

    I tended not to believe tv ratings after that.
    Considering the number of horrendously bad programs that have been on for 5+ seasons, I don't believe that anyone pays any attention to ratings at all and just fabricates numbers.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @boba_fett said:
    We had one of those for about 5 years. I completely took the piss (whole family + a dozen guests logged in to watch Red Dwarf at 2am on a Tuesday night), and they never did anything.

    Ignoring for a moment that I have no clue what "took the piss" means (and I assume don't want to know)... you woke up like 16 people to watch a show at 2am thinking that your Nielson box would... what? Magically produce a new season of the show the next week? Or what?

    Nielson is the best troll.

    "Took the piss" in this context means "Clearly acted against both the spirit and the letter of the rules and made no effort to conceal that fact"

    No, I was staying up until 2am anyway. I was watching it because I liked it. I fabricated the other (19, actually) people by the advanced hacking technique of PRESSING THE BUTTON THAT INDICATED THEY WERE WATCHING, and I did so partly because it amused me to see how far I could skew the ratings and partly because I thought the station I was watching was more likely to continue airing my favoured shows if their ratings were good

    It did not, at the time, cross my mind that "Good enough to air at 2am" is not a particularly high bar to clear, and that it probably didn't need my help



  •  @blakeyrat said:

    Ignoring for a moment that I have no clue what "took the piss" means
    It sounds Euro-pee-in to me.



  • @boba_fett said:

    partly because I thought the station I was watching was more likely to continue airing my favoured shows if their ratings were good
     

    Considering Red Dwarf seems to be coming back on "Dave", you've been successful.



  • @Cassidy said:

    Considering Red Dwarf seems to be coming back on "Dave", you've been successful.
     

    Every time I hear about that channel I think that it was named after the lead character on Red Dwarf.

    Or every Australian computer hacker in the late 1980s/early 1990s.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Zemm said:

    @Cassidy said:

    Considering Red Dwarf seems to be coming back on "Dave", you've been successful.
     

    Every time I hear about that channel I think that it was named after the lead character on Red Dwarf.

    They did temporarily change the logo to add 'Lister' to the end of it when they were screening a new episode of RD back in 2009 (two years after they renamed the channel from UK Gold.)



  • @PJH said:

    They did temporarily change the logo to add 'Lister' to the end of it when they were screening a new episode of RD back in 2009
     

    Yeah, that was neat. Ep wasn't too bad, either - but it wasn't as light-hearted as RD normally is.



  • This is a new type of captcha its probably based on look-up tables containing words commonly associated with the image. Obviously spam bot don't do thinking!



  • @tiagobranco said:

    This is a new type of captcha its probably based on look-up tables containing words commonly associated with the image. Obviously spam bot don't do thinking!
     

    wait about a year and then come back to revise your post


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