Is it just me or is everyone else having a hard time with captchas? They started out innocently enough. Something to type in to prove you weren’t a bot. Then they needed to swirl the text, make it fuzzier, add lines, background letters, etc… It’s to the point now where I’m getting about a 50% success rate with certain captchas. That’s just ridiculous.
It’s bad enough that we’re forcing users to enter in additional, useless information, but now we’re increasing their failure rates. This doesn’t generate positive feelings from an end user’s perspective. I won’t stand here for long throwing stones from my glass house. I know that I’ve certainly done things that have made life harder on my users. For example, moderating all of my comments before finding out about Akismet. But when I was shown the light, I reformed. So I ask everyone who’s got a captcha out there. Please think about us before you install the latest version that makes it so hard to parse that people can’t even parse it anymore.
captcha, usability
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1 response so far ↓
1 Ian // Nov 22, 2006 at 6:10 pm
You’re generalizing — CAPTCHAs aren’t always a great idea, but sometimes there’s no obvious alternative. For example, you can do some heuristic testing on a blog comment: you can check the content, the ip, formatting, whatever.
The other uses of CAPTCHAs, like signing up for… say Hotmail, or something… have less to work with. They have a username/password, and they have to decide on the basis of that whether the signup is from a human of a computer. You can’t just replace that with something like Akismet.
… it’s weird that people mangle them so much too, the most effective thing for fooling OCR is warping the text. Adding line noise etc. is next to useless.