alt Hacker NewsThere has to be some not-yet-discovered way to have a capcha that is easy for any human but impossible for robot. Too bad capchas hurt user experience no matter how easy they are.
Another solution I came up with while reading HN comments: whitelist IPs instead blacklisting. Give access to well-behaving hosts/groups. It can even be shared across different sites. Although this would create a market for selling "good IP" proxies.
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There are definitely ways of proving you're a human, unfortunately it also means giving up your privacy and anonymity (IRL ID Checks combined with appropriate routing and validation - even going as far as certifying the browser being used)
Obviously though none of us want to give that up, so the alternative is that we can almost never 'prove' we are human especially with bots getting as smart or smarter than the average redditor.
> There has to be some not-yet-discovered way to have a capcha that is easy for any human but impossible for robot.
Why? We are not so special or magical.
The reverse turing test :(
Even better: make people pay for access or vouch to give access to a third party.
> whitelist IPs instead blacklisting
I think I agree with this. There will be difficulties though:
- Will likely have to be pay-to-play. No point in whitelisting IPs if you are bombarded with whitelist requests by a bot.
- Will come with the assurance that any bot traffic will result in an IP ban.
- Will rule out people with dynamic IP addresses.
- Will be difficult to gain new users.