I wrote long ago about how Captcha’s are terrible for site usability, seems that one company wants to solve it by making them mini games.
I must applaud the effort to change how they work, and make them easier for users to pass while still hard for machines. Captcha’s still suck though. I still stand behind what I said in my earlier post.
We should be using things like honey pot form elements and Akismet to deal with spam. As I said, spam is the web site owner’s problem not the problem of the user. Stop pushing your problem on to someone else.
2 responses to “Captcha’s Still Suck”
Every now and then, I’m faced with a captcha. What’s worse is that, in an effort to make them harder for computers, they’re nearly impossible for humans. I once had to complete a captcha to order something online … and ended up submitting the form a total of 17 times because I kept getting the captcha wrong.
If someone who works in technology can’t cope with the technical tools that prevent spam, what hope is there for non-tech-savvy users (i.e. my parents)?
There is no hope for them. I end up doing a bunch of them for my wife when she can’t, and she is fairly technically savvy. Like I say, it’s just pushing the solution to the issue of spam on to the people that it doesn’t actually affect and decreases usability. Bad practice.