Captcha From Hell
Yours truly understands the need for good captcha systems; after all, spammers must go to hell. However, extremely distorted captcha images need to go to hell, too. Take the crap of an image (to the right) as Exhibit A.
Captcha images are designed to differentiate man from beast bot. Exhibits B and C below — way much worse than A — make me wonder if I’m still human. (Dammit, I knew sitting in front of my laptop everyday was bad…!)
These images were taken from Feedmarker’s registration page. Feedmarker looks like a good service, but the horrible captcha images might simply frustrate and drive away new users. I wonder which captcha system Feedmarker uses, because it certainly ain’t doing its job well. Actually, it does — if a human can’t read the effing image, how can a spam-bot? (Hopefully this is the worst case, because if it’s not, then…well, let’s just say the captcha would be utterly useless.)
On two different days, I continually refreshed the registration page, and based on un-empirical results, I arrived at the following conclusion: 75% of the time the Feedmarker page coughs up a captcha image that looks like these pitiful Exhibits of ours. Is it just my eye, Lady Fortune’s frown, or the captcha system’s ineptitude?
If you have time to waste, try it out for yourself here, and tell me your batting ratio.
Update (10/12/06): It looks like the captcha problem has been fixed (and fixed good). Thanks to Bruno of Feedmarker and j4s0n for the heads up!
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September 14th, 2006 at 6:51 am
hahahaha. grabe naman yan. btw nakakatawa yung resulting google ads mo. ‘please go not go to hell, Where will you go when you die? Find out today how to go to heaven.’ hehe
September 14th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Well wouldja look at that. Three out of four times I’ve reloaded the CAPTCHA was okay. To think that when I first tried it out, it was Helllllll~! Anyway. At least they do raise the bar of difficulty. Ha.
September 15th, 2006 at 12:25 am
i don’t like captcha…istorbo…and sometimes, the characters are very hard to figure out…
September 17th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
I believe captcha helps the owner to protect their website with spam and bots and theres nothing wrong in having it in the website. It’s just how they gonna used it that matters.
September 19th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
kael: you think?!
September 19th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Gary, yep, they’re effing funny. The one I’ve got here right now reads: “No One Will Burn in Hell For All Eternity-And We Can Prove It!”
Ia, it’s just your lucky day, hehe.
Cyberpunk, yeah, let’s blame the spammers for the necessity for captchas
Life’s smoother for Net surfers without them, but website admins (like Ia hehe) need ‘em and rely on ‘em to make the job less stressful, like what Kael alluded to. I agree — it’s the manner in how the captcha system is used/presented that matters. Make it too difficult for authentic human users, and the system’s already crossing the thin line separating usability and spam protection.
September 28th, 2006 at 11:39 am
The second captcha I looked at was blank, containing only the light gray noise that the rest of them have!
September 29th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Tom, you got a certified winner, hehe!
October 9th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Hey, thanks for pointing out that bug. There was a mistake in the captcha generating algorithm that was creating some wacky images. I’m working on a fix.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
It’s fixed