Comments | codeman38: Adventures in Bad CAPTCHA Design

codeman38

Adventures in Bad CAPTCHA Design

Feb 26, 2008 11:12

I was just trying to register for a forum today, and came across a CAPTCHA that looked like this (this isn't the one that I actually failed, but it was generated soon thereafter):

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Comments 7

mornhyland February 26 2008, 16:41:51 UTC

All of these drive me batty. I can't make some of the letters at all due to the distortion, and other I can't tell case or differentiate sometimes between certain letters. I've given up if they have this sort of system.

nausved February 26 2008, 20:41:46 UTC

I cannot list how many sites where I have been unable to register due to precisely this problem.

The worst part is when you are not allowed to contact anyone for help until after you've registered.

codeman38 February 26 2008, 21:00:36 UTC

Gah, yes, I've seen that on a few sites as well! Or where they'll have a contact e-mail address, and it's not actually valid...

(The comment has been removed)

codeman38 February 27 2008, 00:56:31 UTC

Yeah, it's so obvious.

The kicker is that the forum in question was developed in Java servlets, so all they had to do was change "equals" to "equalsIgnoreCase". >_

moggymania February 27 2008, 03:08:30 UTC

I seem to have a weird problem with my first attempt at a captcha *always* being judged incorrect (even if it's a very simple one), and my second one almost always working (eveni f it's difficult). I haven't been able to figure out quite why this is, but I've learned to really hate the effing things.

A year or two ago, I read about an alternative a guy had come up with that used randomly-generated images of common animals instead… I really wish that would become the norm!

azalynn February 27 2008, 03:56:27 UTC

Wow. Someone obviously wasn't thinking!

And speaking of CAPTCHAS -- another thing that irritates me to no end is when I'm entering the CAPTCHA text on a page that "times out" and makes you enter another CAPTCHA if you take too long to post your response or enter in the first CAPTCHA. 9 times out of 10, the second one I get will be really long, annoying, and harder to parse than the first!