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:
![[screenshot of NYtimes.com CAPTCHA]](/writable/images/robs_blogs/nytcaptcha.jpg)
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.)
Comments
I agree it's a pain, and there are probably better ways to deal with spam. It's probably in this case an unimaginative solution. However I think we have to get away from the idea that once a user is logged in (with an account that required a CAPTCHA to register) then that user is necessarily human.
Comment/link spam can be lucrative enough to pay people to solve CAPTCHA tests all day, especially if all they need to do is to solve the test once. The account is then passed to a bot - and suddenly the target site has a spam problem until the user account is deleted.
Read something more recent.
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Visitors
Maybe its the universal solution to forum trolls. Make them weigh the effort of typing in "first" if it requires MORE work.