Remove the word "CAPTCHA" from user-facing text

We use the word "CAPTCHA" only in the settings page (available for administrators). For visitors, we actually use the term "Word verification".

If we want all the instances replaced, let's figure out what each string should be changed to.

subscribe ;)

I can certainly see both sides to this issue.

Pros and cons for a change:

+ As an acronym, it is pretty awful, I agree, and was obviously created for the way it sounded (as opposed to an unpronounceable initialism).
+ As David Lesieur points out, all the other places (who probably have actual usability staff) use some other phrase. As has been noted, people's expectations are created on other sites; in many cases, your site should conform to the standard if there is one.

- CAPTCHA is a recognized acronym; I see 89,000,000 entries in Google for it. (And 159,000 for 'CAPTCHA Mollom'.)
- I've never been a fan of dumbing stuff down if the word being debated is a word someone, IMO, should know (I favored 'taxonomy' over 'category'.)

But really, this does comes down to figuring out what we could use in its place.

Going to leave this as postponed for now.

Since we changed a lot of strings in 6.x already, now would be a good time to perform this change.

I agree that "CAPTCHA" is very techy and regular users on the net (like my dad) have no idea at all what it means.

The only string I'm struggling with is "play as audio"... I fail in trying to translate it, and actually, when disregarding the entire current wording, I don't even have an idea how I'd call this action in German in the first place. At least to my knowledge, the term "audio" is usually not used in a context like this, and rather used as subject/noun on its own, like it was in "play {audio CAPTCHA}".

I even considered to cut it down to just "play", but when thinking of the human interaction, it's rather like "listen"... but I figure that a single verb would be too cryptic anyway.

Any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions?

+++ mollom.module	6 Feb 2010 13:54:22 -0000
@@ -1166,10 +1166,10 @@ function mollom_pre_render_mollom($eleme
-      $captcha .= '</a> (<a href="#" class="mollom-audio-captcha">' . t('play audio CAPTCHA') . '</a>)';
+      $captcha .= '</span> (<a href="#" class="mollom-audio-captcha">' . t('play as audio') . '</a>)';

To me, 'play as audio' suggests that we'd play the text on the image captcha. In reality, we play another captcha.

its there any recaptcha module? couse i was having problem with CAPTCHA

Kuberia, there is a recaptcha module at: http://drupal.org/project/recaptcha
but it depends on captcha...hopefully by now you've sorted things out though,
since it's been a couple of months...

Subscribe and +1.

OMG. It's effulgentsia! ;)

Thought about this some more. What about some more actionable task-alike link texts - "verify via audio" and "verify via image" ?

The administrative UI of Mollom uses "CAPTCHA" all over the place. However, I'd assume that site admins understand what a CAPTCHA is.

Welcome effulgentsia! (effulgentsia stumbled upon this issue when trying to add a CAPTCHA to one of Drupal Gardens' forms.)

I'd prefer to get rid of the text on the form all together. I think we talked about it in the past. Below is what Google does. As you can see, they use the words "Word verification" but they don't use any additional text relative to the audio CAPTCHA. Instead, they use an accessibility icon. We could leave that to a follow-up patch.

Either way, "verify via" sounds a bit funny. Maybe it should be "verify using"? I'm not native English. I'm comfortable committing this patch but let's wait a few hours to see if anyone else has something to add.

"verify using" sounds indeed better, though "verify using audio" sounds a bit wonky again. :-|

I guess that icon/image/symbol only hides that complex-to-express link text in a link title attribute, so not everyone has to read it. Probably a very good idea. But indeed, separate issue, as it doesn't solve the wording problem.

I don't think "verify using audio" or "verify using image" sound wonky. I think changing #13's "via" to "using" would make the patch RTBC, and switching to an icon as per #15 can be a separate issue.

(@sun: Sorry to have been falling behind in the D7 issue queue. I'm looking forward to catching up some day soon.)

Here's patches for HEAD and D6.

Agreed on "using".

Momentum is, where effulgentsia appears.

Assumed that waiting for tests to pass would be nice, but apparently we've got a fatal error in HEAD: http://qa.drupal.org/pifr/test/26510 so no testbot love :)

Agreed that "CAPTCHA" is not a good word for end-user-facing text. It sounds like "capture" pronounced by a New Englander, and could leave end-users wondering, "why are they trying to capture me?" It's fine for admins and technically-oriented folks, but could alarm those less sophisticated. I would prefer references to "visual puzzles" or "anti-spambot puzzles" — just "enter the text you see". Be sure to scrub popups (title attributes and such) too.

There is a reference above (Google page?) showing a wheelchair logo for the audio presentation of the CAPTCHA text. I think you'd be better off using a blue ear with sound waves going into it (sorry, no image at hand to demonstrate it), or maybe a loudspeaker icon (emitting sound waves). Non-visually impaired people might want to use that option if they're having trouble decoding the visual image (too distorted), and might be turned off by being considered "handicapped", or not understand that it's an audio option.

Thanks, Everett and Druid, for sharing your perspectives.

Looking at the timestamps of #20 and #21, and not finding any explicit reason in #21 for demoting the issue status, I think #21 was an x-post, so re-RTBC as per #20.

Be sure to scrub popups (title attributes and such) too.

I believe #18 does this. Please share specifics if it missed something.

I think you'd be better off using a blue ear with sound waves going into it (sorry, no image at hand to demonstrate it), or maybe a loudspeaker icon (emitting sound waves)

#16 suggests making the icon discussion a separate issue, so that the text change in this issue isn't held up by that, and I agree, so I opened a new issue for it: #856586: Use an icon instead of text links to toggle image and audio captchas.

Committed to CVS HEAD. Thanks.

Don't want to be "that guy" who reopens an issue, but I will.

Since there seemed to be some concerns with the selected wording I thought I'd throw in a new suggestion, used by reCAPTCHA, and which I think actually sounds better / makes more sense. It's also nice that this would provide a bit of consistency between two popular CAPTCHA systems.

"Get an audio challenge"

"Get a visual challenge"

"Get a new challenge" (provided that this is an option.)

I just wondered why this issue is still open, and even double-checked that there are no more "CAPTCHA" strings in end-user-facing messages.

The follow-up suggestion is interesting, created a new issue for it: #2132657: Change CAPTCHA switch links from "verify using audio|image" to "Get an audio|visual challenge"