Namebio ridiculous captcha

As a curiosity, I tried to visit namebio. Confirmed: it is impossible to solve the captcha. In my business model, there is no need to use namebio frequently or at all though (only to generate a list of similar domains sold if needed during a particular negotiation. Somewhat rare. GoDaddy appraisal as well as dnpric.es do also work for this purpose). So, the question - if namebio is looking for (and has) paid subscribers, how they are supposed to login now?

Very true.... Not like it is verifying that some automated engine is using the site but you need to find each and every truck correct. If anyone gets one wrong you need to start again with a new boat or bicycle.

I just went to Namebio and solved in 2 attempts.

But yes, they need to be more friendly with these.

takes me 3 puzzles on avg...today I had like 10 still didnt get in

can u say outrage

can u say ridiculous

like I said namebio used to be good and fun... now many dont even bother going

I stopped using namebio also because it became a headache. Shame really cause it was pretty good before.

Weird - I just went on as a guest and had no captcha appear at all.....

Is that just my cache, cookies or something?

NickB said:

Weird - I just went on as a guest and had no captcha appear at all.....

Is that just my cache, cookies or something?

Click to expand...

Not sure. I just visited for the first time in months and got the spot the tiny boat in the tiny images captcha.

NickB said:

Weird - I just went on as a guest and had no captcha appear at all.....

Is that just my cache, cookies or something?

Click to expand...

Clear cache and try and let us know.

Mostly I finish in 1 attempt, but sometimes there is that one where you need to find the trains, but it never works. ANNOYING!

koolishman said:

Clear cache and try and let us know.

Click to expand...

Didn't take long as I had recently done it......cleared cache & cookies

Still no captcha for me....

I did have it the other day....took me through 3 pictures where I had to squint

yes, too weird and tired of

there's any other service to alternate it?
---
Edited: just visit dnpric.es, too weird again
Error establishing a database connection

I think he added that to keep crawlers away from his data, however he might want to add a login link/button on the captcha screen so paid users are able to login straight away and avoid further captchas.
I can confirm it's very annoying, even for the few times I ever have to visit namebio

First of all, the CAPTCHA always goes through two stages. One is a control group where the service provider knows the correct answers and can verify your accuracy. The other they don't already know the correct answers, and you're telling them so they can use the answers for future puzzles. The minimum you could go through is two sets of images, that is true for any CAPTCHA.

Second of all, the answers you give aren't everything. They also look at things like your browser, screen size, mouse movements, etc. to try to determine if you're human. You can literally answer every single question wrong on purpose, and still get through as a human in less than a minute. Of course that cuts both ways, you could answer correctly and they might still think you're a bot. That's incredibly rare though.

Watch this video of me doing exactly that just now, answering wrong on purpose every time. It doesn't even take this long on desktop because there are mouse movements for them to interpret:


I've tested hCaptcha hundreds of times, and every time I'm being serious I get through like this:


Third of all, I've tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible. If you solve it correctly, it logs your IP address and then won't ask you to solve it again for an entire week. That means if you're at home/work and you solve it on your computer, you won't have to solve it on your phone or your tablet even, because they're all on the same external IP address. I can't make it any easier than that without making it easy for bots too.

Of course if your IP changes you might have to do it again earlier, but there's not too much I can do about that if you don't have a fairly static IP. I can't use cookies because bots can just fake those.

I didn't just wake up one day and add it to annoy you guys. I've spent hundreds of hours trying to stop the bots from crushing the site before resorting to the CAPTCHA. This is the only thing that has worked 100%. I tried it with ReCAPTCHA first, but got a lot of complaints that it is blocked in China and other countries. And it also does a garbage job of stopping CAPTCHA farms from solving on behalf of bots. So I switched to the next most popular provider which is hCaptcha. It's a lose-lose for me though, no matter what I do that actually stops bots it will cause a bunch of you to be upset.

There are really only three options here:

1. No CAPTCHA. The bots slam us into oblivion. Either the site loads painfully slow, if at all, or we go bankrupt trying to scale up our infrastructure to support millions of bot visits a day when all we should really need to support is a few thousand of you humans a day. This is a non-starter.

2. Deal with the outrageous, absolutely ridiculous task of solving one CAPTCHA a week. Maybe it takes you a few extra tries if you need new glasses, can't tell that a wing is part of an airplane, or that a subway is a kind of train. Or you can literally just click on any image without even looking at what they want you to click on, and eventually it'll figure out through other means in less than a minute that you're a human.

3. Pay a whopping $60/year for a membership, and never solve another CAPTCHA. Oh and get a lot of other benefits as well, like no ads, more data, more features, the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting a site that you use to make money, etc.

I'm sorry we had to add a CAPTCHA for free users. I don't like it either, but the data is too valuable and too many people in this industry feel entitled to crash our server trying to take it all. I would love to have months of my life back that I spent trying everything under the sun to stop the bots before resorting to this. But it is what it is. I didn't do it out of paranoia, I did it in response to an absolutely crippling attack.

You can thank whoever decided it'd be alright to hit us hundreds of thousands of times a day from tens of thousands of IP addresses, rather than paying a trivial amount for API access, for the CAPTCHA. Why do you think Estibot only lets you do one search a day without becoming a paid member? Because people did this to them as well and they got fed up with it a lot faster than I did.

I guess I could do that too... but I prefer to still make the data accessible to those who can't afford a membership. I added a login link to the CAPTCHA page as @Gube suggested for now though.

A browser with a normal secure setup (adblock, no social media tracking, no 3rd party tracking, etc) is NOT compatible with this captcha at this time. For the reasons of fairness, I should say that google captcha tends to ask me more times to find bridges or boats, but with google captcha I can at least proceed further. Not with current namebio captcha... as it constantly showed me new tasks until I closed the window.

tonyk2000 said:

A browser with a normal secure setup (adblock, no social media tracking, no 3rd party tracking, etc) is NOT compatible with this captcha at this time. For the reasons of fairness, I should say that google captcha tends to ask me more times to find bridges or boats, but with google captcha I can at least proceed further. Not with current namebio captcha...

Click to expand...

Did you try in incognito mode already? (It's not for the few ads on namebio, they don't throw you thousands of popups in the face daily as other sites do)

tonyk2000 said:

A browser with a normal secure setup (adblock, no social media tracking, no 3rd party tracking, etc) is NOT compatible with this captcha at this time. For the reasons of fairness, I should say that google captcha tends to ask me more times to find bridges or boats, but with google captcha I can at least proceed further. Not with current namebio captcha... as it constantly showed me new tasks until I closed the window.

Click to expand...

That is not true. I literally just got through on my first try using Firefox in a private browsing window with the security settings jacked up to "Strict" and ad block enabled. It isn't cookie-based as I mentioned earlier.

Feel free to send me a screen recording so I can take a look though.

Gube said:

Did you try in incognito mode already?

Click to expand...

Not yet.

Actually I do not think it is worth all those efforts (at least for my limited occasional needs). Nothing wrong with namebio business model (expect making wholesale prices of expired sales public), and I highly respect @Michael and his efforts, but I am not a regular namebio user nor potential paid user... If I need comps for negotiation - there are many other ways to find those. The last but not the least, simply sending a buyer to dnjournal top100 sales link is also workable

...To each his own. Some may need a frequent access to this DB. Becoming 100% paid service? It may be a solution... Current captcha game is not a solution. Imo.

I have been experiencing the same thing for weeks now. It even pop up repeated captcha for me after marked 'not robot'. I don't know why.

If you have an account and logged there's no captcha.

As a tech person I can tell you that such measures are sometimes unavoidable and @Michael is doing what is needed in this particular situation, to protect their business and data.

yea from looks of it 90% mp members disliking this wont be enuf to get a change done.

it's hard not to appreciate what owner has done over years but u gotta be insane if u will allow yerself to be forced into some childish puzzle picture games that often take many screen to solve...and more than once I never even got thru aftr 10 puzzles and few mins of wasted eye strain... and definitely not just once per week for me either .

so ya.. I'd love to visit namebio... but thanks for making it so I cant.

tnx for the years before of this great site.

bye bye.

Hmm let me think about this...

• Pay less than 16.5 cents per day to get access to a really nice website with great data.
• Never be hassled or get frustrated while logging in, which would really just cost me way more in lost time not to mention the headaches - ouch!

Conclusion - it's a no brainer sign me up - oh wait, I already did that and now I'm a totally happy camper!

Thanks @Michael you rock!!!

P.S. I might have to upgrade???

I'll tell you guys what. Anyone who has issues with the CAPTCHA and can't afford/justify a membership can go register on the site for free, send me a PM with your email address, and I'll set up a "Human Membership" for you. It won't have any benefits other than not having to solve the CAPTCHA, but if you abuse it with software you'll be banned for life.

https://namebio.com/memberships?register

If you already signed up for our mobile game, or registered on the site, you can just skip straight to the PM.

Sound good?

@alcy I don't think you understand how statistics work. If 90% of the people who responded to this thread were complaining, that doesn't mean 90% of NP users overall dislike the CAPTCHA, since this is a thread to complain it's going to be heavily biased towards complaints. It's actually probably more like 100%. You'd have to be a little nuts to like a CAPTCHA

But probably 98% of them get through it without issue. They just aren't going to post in this thread.

@Michael i have logged in and redirect here https://namebio.com/memberships but when i try to visit just https://namebio.com i must solve captcha. what the
i told you in dm, your captcha settings have a problem.
namesilo also uses hCaptcha but it only takes 3 images and there are no problems

This captcha does cause some trouble, still like before.