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Thread: I hate captchas
Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)
From: Penny Roberts
Date: Tue, Mar 13 2007 2:50AM
Subject: I hate captchas
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I know that you know this: no need to reply. I just need to share...
<vent>
I hate chaptchas. Four times over the weekend (on completely different
sites) I had to use the damn things and *every *single *time* I got it
wrong at the first attempt. One was so unclear that I asked Kev to take
a look and between us we agreed what the character was. Ha! we were
both wrong.
One of them was particularly galling because it was at the bottom of a
form. One of the firlds on the form was a date and it had a handy
dandy JavaScript date picker... which told me that I didn't have
authority to use it! So I had to type the date in manually but there
was no clue as to the format they required. So I took a guess and got
it wrong... twice (so three attempts). And each time the B!@@%y captcha
changed!
</vent>
Thank you for your time,
Penny
From: Tim Beadle
Date: Tue, Mar 13 2007 4:00AM
Subject: Re: I hate captchas
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On 13/03/07, Penny Roberts < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> I know that you know this: no need to reply. I just need to share...
>
> <vent>
> I hate chaptchas. Four times over the weekend (on completely different
> sites) I had to use the damn things and *every *single *time* I got it
> wrong at the first attempt. One was so unclear that I asked Kev to take
> a look and between us we agreed what the character was. Ha! we were
> both wrong.
> One of them was particularly galling because it was at the bottom of a
> form. One of the firlds on the form was a date and it had a handy
> dandy JavaScript date picker... which told me that I didn't have
> authority to use it! So I had to type the date in manually but there
> was no clue as to the format they required. So I took a guess and got
> it wrong... twice (so three attempts). And each time the B!@@%y captcha
> changed!
> </vent>
I know - I have pretty normal vision and I hate using them too. It's
such a lazy way of bot-proofing your site - it puts all the burden
onto the user instead of the site developer.
My general rule of thumb is this: "it's better to make life easier for
the user, even if that means a harder job for the developer."
Tim
From: Rimantas Liubertas
Date: Tue, Mar 13 2007 5:10AM
Subject: Re: I hate captchas
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<..>
> My general rule of thumb is this: "it's better to make life easier for
> the user, even if that means a harder job for the developer."
I use to quote quite similar words quite often, alas, I don't remember
the author...
It was either Krug or Seth Godin:
"Make it harder for the database, easier for the user".
Regards,
Rimantas
--
http://rimantas.com/
From: Emma Duke-Williams
Date: Tue, Mar 13 2007 6:10AM
Subject: Re: I hate captchas
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On 3/13/07, Penny Roberts < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> <vent>
> And each time the B!@@%y captcha
> changed!
> </vent>
You have my every sympathy! I was trying to fill one up at the
weekend. The first hurdle was that I had to enter my Date of Birth. I
dislike doing that, though I'm quite happy to confirm that I'm over
13. Once I'd done that, with the usual DoB I enter (1/1/1900), I
proceeded to fill up the form, attempt to guess the captcha a few
times before finally getting it right - and was told my DoB was
invalid.
How do they know I'm not 107?!
Emma
--
Blog: http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/
From: Gareth Dart
Date: Tue, Mar 13 2007 6:20AM
Subject: Re: I hate captchas
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There seems to be a belief common to designers of captchas that, as soon as their form goes live, a small red LED will start flashing at the board meeting of the World Evil Hacker Organisation. Shady figures will exchange nods and evil cackles, temporarily cease their endless stroking of long haired white cats whilst they direct their minions to do their worst, and then the combined resources of the world hacking community will be targeted solely upon the objective of cracking their form. If they have not made that image as hard to read as is humanly possible, then earthquakes will strike in Japan, lightning will flash down from the sky and ignite the world's rainforests, aliens will invade and Bob the website boss will be mildly peeved about all the spamming.
I expect this doesn't happen every time.
The character string just needs to be obfuscated enough so that a casual 'bot with limited intelligence will throw up it's figurative arms and skip off somewhere else (and therefore for anything really important, captchas are not sufficient). What they definitely shouldn't do is impair the user experience.
G
From: tedd
Date: Tue, Mar 13 2007 6:30AM
Subject: Re: I hate captchas
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At 1:17 PM +0000 3/13/07, Gareth Dart wrote:
>There seems to be a belief common to designers of captchas that, as
>soon as their form goes live, a small red LED will start flashing at
>the board meeting of the World Evil Hacker Organisation. Shady
>figures will exchange nods and evil cackles, temporarily cease their
>endless stroking of long haired white cats whilst they direct their
>minions to do their worst, and then the combined resources of the
>world hacking community will be targeted solely upon the objective
>of cracking their form. If they have not made that image as hard to
>read as is humanly possible, then earthquakes will strike in Japan,
>lightning will flash down from the sky and ignite the world's
>rainforests, aliens will invade and Bob the website boss will be
>mildly peeved about all the spamming.
>
>I expect this doesn't happen every time.
>
>The character string just needs to be obfuscated enough so that a
>casual 'bot with limited intelligence will throw up it's figurative
>arms and skip off somewhere else (and therefore for anything really
>important, captchas are not sufficient). What they definitely
>shouldn't do is impair the user experience.
>
>G
I agree. If captchas are "needed", then simple ones can be employed
to throw off most casual bots. What I mean by simple is generating a
random string like:
"Please type in the number seven" -- and the answer is "7"
I don't think many would have problems with that, or am I wrong?
Cheers,
tedd
--
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