Thursday, March 01, 2007

Captcha peeve

Why do most blogs out there use "captchas" (the verification routine where you have to type in the letters/numbers in an image) before letting you post?

Presumably it's to stop automated spam. But I've had this blog for six months now, and while it's no DailyKos, the readership seems surprisingly large to me. I haven't enabled captchas, and I've never had automated spam comments. (On rare occasions I've had offtopic spam, but it didn't seem like they were automated, and they're hardly frequent enough to matter.) So is the captcha annoyance really necessary?

Right now, blogger's captcha seems broken -- instead of a "verification image" I get the helpful text "Visual verification", and apparently I'm supposed to guess what the image says before typing in a comment on a blog that uses captchas. So that blog owner is deprived, at the moment, not just of my profound insights, but of everyone else's as well.

And even when the captcha works, I only ever bother to type it in when it's a blog I find truly interesting. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Please, let's get rid of the captchas.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too got that message; i thought my browser had problems; i turned out right i believe as my IE showed me the letters.

Maybe, automated spam might start from today. ;)

Unknown said...

yeah- the problem with it seems browser-specific. i got "visual verification" with firefox but can see the actual word/image in safari. but i agree, it's irritating and a lot of trouble to go through just to leave my $0.02. ;)

Rahul Siddharthan said...

alex, g.f.i. - I too wondered about browsers, but Google supports Firefox and uses Linux internally so I supposed it wasn't that. (Meanwhile, many of their services don't support Safari.)

Anyway, not supporting firefox is worth a crib in its own right, especially when it's Google. It seemed to have sorted itself out later.

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