My problems with Captchas or I should say the lack of them

  I've been having a lot of trouble with Captchas, lately.  For years I had no trouble seeing the captchas, typing them and then leaving the comment. But now it seemed like when Google changed its privacy policies all of a sudden I stopped being able to see the captchas.  I noticed it but didn't really care about it until I tried to leave a comment at Hollis In the Company of Plants and Rocks. so I could be included in Accretionary Wedge -43  .  Then it seemed like no matter what I did, I just could not leave the comment.  I got so frustrated. Normally I would have emailed Hollis or tried some other way to contact her but there was no other places I could see where I could go to do so. That left me trying to figure out another way to get my comment in.  It was puzzling to me because I could leave comments at the Accretionary Wedge  Blog spot, but not at Hollis' place. I didn't know if Hollis would look at the AW since the call for post  for 43 wasn't up there yet and that is normally where I would have left it under its call for post comments. I assumed she wasn't going to see it and thought it best to have a back up plan.   I saw where Silver Fox was able to leave hers so I contacted her and was very appreciative of her help.  She left the comment so that Hollis could get it. (THANKS - SILVER FOX)
  I took some pictures so I could show others my problem because when I just tried copying the stuff it wouldn't show up as I had copied and you couldn't see what my problem was.  I couldn't get it all on one picture - I had to take two but - it shows the words not showing up.

Here's my comment:

 And here's the lack of captchs to type

  I like to follow Slobber and Spittle from time to time, and I noticed Cujo359 has troubles with captchas also with this post  More on Captchas. and also about a week ago this post: Even More on Captchas . I wanted to leave a comment and ran into the same problem I was having with Hollis of no visible captchas to type. This time I was determined to leave a comment and I did by listening to the audio until I got one that I could type and it worked.   As seen here ( I was able to copy these).

5 comments:

Expat said...

About the grouse, the problem was a time-out of the bloody proof that I was not a robot and had to try an even longer version to get the comment posted. The grouse was put on as an afterthought before Publish was achieved. On an even earlier comment, about four tries were made, there is/is not a case sensitivity involved e.g. l and I which are only slightly different than 1 (lower case L or upper case i which can be difficult with the number 1), or S and 5 or a displaced or distorted lower case G. After the thirtieth anniversary of turning 39, the eyes aren't what they once were, plus encroaching dyslexia adds a certain spice of misapprehension, sometimes to great personal amusement. OK, I'll try again with the game: "The characters you entered didn't match the word verification. Please try again."

March 13, 2012 11:50 AM

Cujo359 said...

Well, I find the things annoying anyway. I understand most of the design decisions that went into captchas, but they're still a pain. I don't know whether the captchas used here are case-sensitive or not. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder, I'm sorry to say. I'm sure, though, that if it had and I had figured that out, in a few months' time that answer wouldn't have been valid. Making the page bigger usually works. At least, it works as reliably as anything can.

March 13, 2012 12:27 PM

Cujo359 said...

Oh, and thanks for hanging in there..

March 13, 2012 12:28 PM

Ann said...

My problem with captchas is that lately my screen has been blank and there is nothing there to see to type when it says 'Type the two words'. How do you get an image there when there isn't one and you hit the circle thingy and its still blank? The ? just lets you send a comment to google which they do nothing to help you with. So that leaves listening to the audio. This is frustrating because you don't know if you have to type or hit the number keys. You think you got it right and enter it. But it keeps on saying 'the characters you entered didn't match the word verification. Please try again.'I'm having this problem again and wonder how many times I should try before giving up.

March 15, 2012 6:14 AM

Cujo359 said...

Sounds like you're way ahead of me, Ann. I've never even tried that sound thingy. Guess I'll have to one of these days... Meanwhile, I can think of three possible reasons why you aren't seeing captchas. Depending what site you're visiting, they may or may not apply. 1. The domain ("website") that is actually producing the captchas is down, or its domain name isn't coming up when your browser does a name (DNS) query. There's nothing you can do about that one, I'm afraid. I don't think this applies to Blogspot/Google, though. I believe it does its own. The generated images definitely are served up by Google. 2. You don't have Javascript enabled, or if you're running something like the Firefox NoScript extension, you don't have a necessary domain enabled. This one often bites me. 3. Your browser is set up to filter images (unlikely), or there's a web proxy that's blocking them. If you're at home, then it's at least possible you have a web proxy running on your Internet router. If you're at work, your network admins will know whether they're trying to do such a thing. As for what to do about trying to recover, the thing I usually try to do first, assuming what you've tried has failed: * Start up my favorite editor (for me, that's a terminal window and vi), and copy and paste the comment into it. I emphasize the word "copy", because you don't need to remove your comment from the comment form. That's done in Windows by grabbing all the text, then typing Ctrl-C (a single key, not the string). Windows used to have a utility called Notepad that was perfect for this sort of thing, but it's either hard to find or optional on newer Windows. You need a program that won't try to interpret or convert the HTML tags. * Reload the comments page. Sometimes that clears it. If it doesn't, you have a copy of your comment that you can e-mail.

I'm still having troubles leaving comments, but I wanted Cujo359 to know I did see his comments and I do want to thank him for his suggestions.
Thanks Cujo359
I really do appreciate you writing back like you did & I hope you see this. 

So far nothing worked.  I'm too the point of calling the computer guy to see if he can figure it out, but right now its not critical and I've had other things on my agenda that's been consuming most of my time. It will just have to wait for awhile until I have more pressing problems with the computer.

If anyone else has any ideas I'd love to see them.