Published on February 10, 2012 Captchas that will drive you insane
To prevent website forms being populated with spam and sent by automated bots, shopping cart and other content management systems use special “challenge-question” software called “CAPTCHAS” that are embedded into these forms. CAPTCHAS ask humans to prove that they are real people by interpreting a graphic and writing in to a box what the box says.
In the early days, CAPTCHAS were basic images of words distorted with lines or dots to make them to hard for automated systems to interpret but not so hard they affected the user experience of signing up as a customer and buying your products. This worked well for a long time until spammers became more sophisticated and invented ways to “read” and respond to these challenge questions. The response by software has been to make CAPTCHAS even harder for bots to interpret. The problem is that nowadays many CAPTCHAS are so hard to read that they can’t be read! It’s getting ridiculous and companies like Twitter and Google have adopted the hardest and most confusing CAPTCHA technologies that seem to exist. Some of these drive you crazy!
Here are some of the worst…. These are 100% legit screenshots taken from some of the most popular websites on the Net…
Pathetic is right…. what on earth is that second word?
Your guess is as good as mine. Will they accept something-something-something-b?
Last time I checked CAPTCHAS were supposed to be in Latin letters, so why did Hebrew appear. And the word on the right? Your guess is as good as mine.
Take that! Yes folks, take that literally because that’s all you can take. Who knows what the one on the left is. I gave up after twisting my eyes around this 5 times!
AAArgh! I give up. I hate CAPTCHAS!!!!
We agree that we may have exaggerated this a bit but the sad thing about CAPTCHAS is that hard to use experiences like this make it harder for customers to register on a website, and harder for them to buy from you. You’re better off with excellent anti-spam software on your inbox and Spam Assassin at your hosting provider end (which is available by default on all Ozcart websites) than to have no customers because nobody will sign up!
For the record, Ozcart does use CAPTCHAS for many web forms in online stores, but you can disable/activate every single one for every form, and we do not use the service that these companies have used to generate the above mentioned shots. We want people to actually want to use our customer’s sites!
Update: We offer 3 different CAPTCHAS, including the excellent Google reCAPTCHA (greatly improved), from which you can choose.
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Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart.
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