Wednesday, March 28, 2012

CAPTCHA!

I'm going to just go ahead and throw this rant out here before my head explodes. I'm sure you've all dealt with it enough to know what I mean, even if not quite to the same extent.

There's something about the whole Captcha system that will just never get along with me. I appreciate the effort to cut back on the amount of spam we see on the internet, but it's getting somewhat out of hand. Why should I have to prove that I am a human every time I want to say anything? I had to prove I was a human to create an account to begin with, why isn't that enough? Must I prove my humanity every time I type? Here's a fact: it lowers every time I have to type a Captcha.


Whose idea was this?!

To make matters worse, most Captcha systems are so bad that I actually need someone else to sit down at my desk and type them in for me. Recent advances have done little to absolve my issues. Captcha too convoluted to actually read? Click this button for audio Captcha! Not very helpful to a deaf person, sorry. As I sit here helplessly rolling my face across my keyboard in an effort to login, whatever I had to say is lost to frustration. My time would've been better spent typing to myself in Wordpad and then hitting delete.

Were they actual words, at the very least I could make out whatever letters I was able to and then use my autism powers to figure out what the hell it is I'm expected to type in. But they aren't actually words, not usually, so I've no way to solve the puzzle.

Is there a particular need to smoosh it all together unintelligibly? Are lines, spots, and shadows really doing anything except pissing people off? What's with the Captchas that are multiple colors? Do you know what that crap looks like to a color blind person? It looks like a fucking Matisse! Chill out, guys. We're not trying to combat Skynet or Cylons here.

1 comment:

  1. Apparently I'm going back and reading old blog posts from you today.

    I totally agree. Ug. I can't make them out half the time, and the audio ones are hardly any better. I sit there thinking I heard another word in the background and wondering if I was suppose to type that in or what. A computer can't read the text in an image anyway, so why not just make it easy and take a picture of the image? =(

    It's also really annoying that I had to do a CAPTCHA to post this. And the audio one was super creepy.

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