What’s with the US-centric captchas?

[royabrown2]

Why on earth does this UK Sony Community expect me to know what a bunch of American road furniture looks like just so I can log on? 

Traffic lights that don’t look like ours, fire hydrants you never find in the UK, school buses of a US-only design?

How about some captchas that actually reflect where we are coming from?

[spannerzone]

I guess it's down to the captcha supplier, probably Google, and we're basically training their AI systems to recognise street furniture in all of their google street maps.... the whole thing behind Captha's is interesting, earlier versions of captcha that had us write out the 2 words we saw onscreen was used to train their computers on word/letter recognition and helped them digitize books. The street furniture is, I imagine, to train Google's computers on how to recognise different items found on the streets which will be used for driverless cars or improved street navigation software and such like.

[Mooly01]

I've moaned about these a couple of years ago. Even when you are sure you have them all correct it still complains and keeps throwing ever more weird images at you. Many a time I haven't been able to log on at all and had to leave a reply via the email option which amazingly actually works. 

I haven't actually had to negotiate this Captcha thing for a while now but I still have to log on each time I visit although my details do seemed to be saved but never auto fill in.

As a moderator on another forum I can say that the way this site works is truly dreadful with regard to logins. No other site I have come across behaves as this one does. I also often get confronted with a list of a hundred countries that I have to select a location from. 

[Mooly01]

Here you go:

https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/general-chat/problems-accessing-sony-community-forums-with-latest-sp... 

[royabrown2]

Cheers @Mooly01 

Another problem I get with this site is that every so often, trying to log on doesn’t. It responds OK, but just stays on the page I was on, instead of bringing up the login screen.

No message, nothing; though sometimes I will get ‘Too many redirects occurred’

On Safari, on my iPad, in both cases. Power cycling the iPad usually fixes it, so I reckon it’s a cache thing, but neither of the other Communities I frequent do this.

And yes, I’ve seen the list of forty countries with the UK a couple of scrolls down away 😢

I think somebody at Sony went to a web designer, gave them an Android TV, and asked them to come up with a Community UI that was no less clunky than the TV UI, so as not to make the TVs look bad 😛

[spannerzone]

I've never seen any captchas on this site but have had plenty of loggin on issues, yesterday it wouldn't let me past the log in screen, it just sat there and eventually gave a bad timeout page. Logging in every visit needs user name entering...seems the site could do with some modernising.

[Win_88]

I don't think Sony has any say on what Captcha shows users to stop spamming or DDOS attacks. I'm not exactly sure I'm on board with the notion here. Why does the captcha system need to be relatable? it's not like it's telling a story!

I'm sure there are more effective ways to volunteer in AI training for UK based projects somewhere else if you care that much.

[royabrown2]

@Win_88 

The purpose of Captchas here is to try to ensure that anyone logging on to this UK community is a human.

I am entirely happy with Captchas that do that; but not with Captchas that test if you are a human with a wide knowledge of the US road system and its street furniture, which is just a subset of what it should be testing for, and arbitrarily excludes those who don’t have that knowledge, as if they were spammers or the mounters of DDOS attacks, when they aren’t.

[kinggo01]

yap.......logging here is PITA.

And while this time worked, 90% of the times it just doesn't. Takes me back to some other SONY page with another login. Or local SONY page or some other merry go round so I just give up.

Asked already why oh why we can't just stay logged in like on every other forum out there but.......

[Mooly01]

The real answer is to do as many sites do and have some form of moderation and post approval for the first few times anyone posts. That gets 99.5% of problem accounts.