Explaining reCAPTCHA upon login

I just replied to a customer support ticket, from a forum user frustrated by the image challenge delivered by reCAPTCHA during login.

I thought I would share my reply below, and also add a bit data about how frequent the issue of spammers is. In other words, we don’t take it lightly that the reCAPTCHA can be a massive pain in donkey, but overall it has been very effective. On some days, we have more than 100 attempted spam signups. Many of these are ‘robots’ (automated scripts that try again every day) but that doesn’t lessen their impact when they’re successful, as they’re programmed to immediately post spam messages.

Here’s my reply, along with a couple of images that reflect the challenge of keeping out spammers.

Thanks for the feedback, and apologies for the frustration with the reCAPTCHA.

I’d be happy to get on a phone call to discuss this.

In short, I understand and agree that it’s no fun to have to complete the image challenges, to log in. However, it’s also the ‘least bad’ option that’s available right now, in trying to find the balance between ease-of-use for legitimate users, and effective spam blocking of spammers and robots.

As I type the rest of this, please keep in mind that I know you’re a legitimate person and forum user.

For most users, the image challenge either never appears, or it appears only rarely. So, I’m wondering if there’s something about your login or location that may be prompting reCAPTCHA to be extra strict. For example, users who’re logging in through a VPN or proxy server may be prompted with the image challenge more frequently.

Compared to earlier versions of reCAPTCHA, which prompt with a word to decipher and type in, the version we’re using is the newest. It provides the nice feature of allowing google (reCAPTCHA’s publisher) to assign a risk score to each login, and decide whether to prompt with the image challenge or not.

As for the image challenge itself, again, I understand it’s no fun. For its rules, I can only refer you to the reCAPTCHA documentation from google.

3 users thanked author for this post.

David, Organic, Marc H