NYtimes.com: Above and Beyond User-Unfriendly

Last year I discussed how the CAPTCHA is a world class user-UNfriendly construct. It's heavily used in the fight against form-spam in an attempt to separate humans from computers by requiring humans to perform challenging cognitive tasks — typically interpreting distorted text.

It's as common as ever, but today I ran across a particularly unpleasant form on the New York Times website:

Bonus points if you can correctly identify the first word in that CAPTCHA on your first try.

Yup. Even though I have had to create a user account on the site (which requires passing a CAPTCHA), and then logged in, I still had to perform another CAPTCHA just to perform an action they want me to perform — sending my friends and family to their site to read articles and view advertising.

So, aside from requiring me to login to their site (which happens from time to time as cookies expire or are wiped out), I then have to perform a difficult cognitive task to prove I'm human after I've already logged in through an email-verified system which itself demonstrates I'm human?

The NYtimes has gone above and beyond the call of user-unfriendly. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to someone, but it's really aggravating to users of the system.

(For the record, we still haven't found it necessary to torture our web visitors at imarc.net. We process spam the old fashioned way — based on actual content — and it works just fine.)