Provide some alternative for the registration CAPTCHA

I have never played Diamond/Pearl and have no idea what Pokemon #428 is called. Refreshing the page brought up Poliwrath, but that still shouldn't have been necessary. Do you really want to prevent non-Pokemon fans from registering?

They want their members to be "real" Pokemon fans, and even if you haven't played D/P, you can just find stuff about them on the net.

So obviously a "real" pokemon fan is somebody who buys every new Nintendo handheld year after year

sure, I can buy that

It's a Pokemon forum and it's entirely possible for people to check Veekun to figure out what the Pokemon is.

Regular CAPTCHA is even worse. These days you're lucky if you can decipher one in three.

I'd use some really easy question that is universal, but that spam bots couldn't guess; indeed, I'm fairly sure that's what Butterfree's hack does in the first place.

This reminds me of when I told a friend who isn't a Pokemon fan about this place, and she joined not realizing it was a Pokemon forum. She was like, "damn, that registration question was a bitch!"

I don't really care either way, but I do agree that if at least the Pokemon's number is given it's not that hard to look up.

I agree that it should be changed to something else. I still struggle with some Pokémon names.

You can refresh or look it up. :/

That isn't going to help anyone who doesn't know the names of many Pokémon.

Looking it up wouldn't help? if you just search for '146' or something on veekun then you get the page of the Pokemon.

Takes less time than fighting with CAPTCHA.

It doesn't provide the number, does it? Just a sprite. Yeah, I can just see that happening. "WHAT IS A RABBIT POKEMON THAT IS BROWN AND KINDA SMALL" on Google. Hmm... I'd sooner just find another forum.

The filename of the sprite is [nationaldex number].png, iirc.

surskitty said:

and it's entirely possible for people to check Veekun to figure out what the Pokemon is.

Click to expand...

An idea: Generate a link to the corresponding Veekun page and place it on the page so people registering can easily visit the link. I had no idea Veekun.com existed.

opaltiger said:

Regular CAPTCHA is even worse. These days you're lucky if you can decipher one in three.

Click to expand...

You're exaggerating; if a good CAPTCHA is used, it's not nearly so bad as that.

Retsu said:

It doesn't provide the number, does it? Just a sprite. Yeah, I can just see that happening. "WHAT IS A RABBIT POKEMON THAT IS BROWN AND KINDA SMALL" on Google. Hmm... I'd sooner just find another forum.

Click to expand...

That was my first instinct, but the number is provided in title text (not very obvious, though—a visible link to Veekun would be a better choice).

Refreshing is not a good option because form fields (especially passwords) have a tendency to clear on refresh in some browsers.

You're exaggerating; if a good CAPTCHA is used, it's not nearly so bad as that.

Click to expand...

The keyword here being "if". I don't know, maybe it's just my experience, but websites tend to use very unreadable CAPTCHA images. I don't understand why anyone uses the system when it's much simpler to just give a simple question; say "Which number comes before [rand 100]". I've seen it done, and it works just fine.

Some sites I've seen use simple math problems (e.g. "2 + 1"). I'm not sure how effective those are though.

Kittenauth might be another viable alternative.

Bots can get around all sorts of CAPTCHA images, math problems and "Type this word into the box", not to mention that the server this forum is on is not actually capable of generating CAPTCHA-images as supported by vBulletin; some bots are also known to be manually registered on forums using CAPTCHA-reading sweatshop workers. Pokémon are extremely convenient for CAPTCHA because they are impossible to get around unless the bot-creator makes a special effort to get around Pokémon questions, and a very overwhelming majority of those who are interested in this forum will know all the names (whether they have actually played every Pokémon game or not in person; it baffles me that it is possible to participate in online Pokémon fandom at all and not learn all the names within a week of a new game being translated whether you're actually trying to or not, seriously), or at least enough to get one they know in a couple of tries or know of an online Pokédex or list to look it up in. I could go through the trouble of putting a link to Veekun on there, but forgive me when I say it strikes me as extremely unnecessary. People like you are one in a thousand.

For the record, image CAPTCHAs frequently have me getting them wrong two or three times. :/

The only problem I've ever had with it is when it's a Pokémon's name that's hard to spell.
I don't really think any of this is worth bringing up though; you don't exactly have to decipher one on a daily basis, and if you really need to, you can just press F5.

Maybe adding some informational text saying "if you don't recognize this Pokemon you can refresh" or something to that extent might help ("typical" captchas usually have a refresh link or something anyway). I'm surprised iimarckus didn't just google up "pokemon 428" (which is what I would have done in that situation)