I love coming across new blogs, particularly those taking part in the #366 Project. It’s amazing to me that on any given day so many people can find so many varied moments to capture for posterity. And I am driven to comment on the image, whether the content, the light, the comedy, the cuteness. So I type out my comment, then spend a moment filling in my details: you know, email, name, or profile-you-wish-to-use. Next, you click comment and are thinking about moving on to something else when bam! Up on the screen is a bunch of goobledygook that looks like it’s been splattered with water, and a message asking you to enter the phrase below.
Are you kidding me? Not only do I have to spend ten minutes squinting at the screen like I am days away from receiving my bus pass, but I have to then retype my comment and details because what the computer and I think are the A are two entirely different things. Captcha is sucking the life-force from me and it must stop.
I hold my hand up to wearing slippers and listening to Radio 4- which recently informed me that the age of the average listener was 55!- but I am not adding to the already-numerous wrinkles on my forehead trying to work out whether that is supposed to be a B or a D just so that some presumably-lovely blogger out there can know that I liked his or her photograph. I have few enough moments in the day to spend online as it is: Dimples is potty-training so every job is broken into bite-sized-chunks as I have to drop everything at ten-minutes intervals to rush her to the loo.
So I am declaring war on Captcha. On all just-checking-you-aren’t-a-robot-type verification stuff. It’s nothing personal, but if you have it, then I won’t be commenting. Chances are I won;t be reading either in future. I know this won’t make a discernible differnce to your life, but it will to mine. I just find it too disheartening to spend the time commenting and then have to abandon it.
If you agree, then tweet #bancaptcha to join my twitter-list of captcha-free bloggers.
I’m with you this, can’t stand them and the audio versions aren’t much better; you hear the faintest of words drowned out by white noise and find yourself having to replay it several times to get the word.
It’s one of those example of where safety for the client trumps the customer’s needs. They’d rather sways of real people are annoyed to hell with the propect of having to decipher and fill ot these things just so long as it stops one or two spammers once in a while. I wish people would start looking at the net effect of using stuff like this.
It was like when I had a rather old computer that I chose not to use anti-virus on. Whilst I was exposing myself to potential threats, having AV at the time made my PC so slow it became unusable. I now have a super quick PC with all the proetction on you can think of, and now Captcha has come in to annoy me instead.
Captcha is making it impossible for me to comment on blogs that I’ve been able to comment on before. I notice it’s especially bad when I’m forced to use OpenID.
I hate it! Hate it, hate it, hate it!
I’m so with you! And I view and comment on every single link-up to #project366, it takes me hours but it’s the least I can do. I have two issues; captcha and no name/url option. I’ve asked people to stop and I’m ignored. Pi**es me off.
It’s strange to say but I’m loving all the hatred in the comments here. Glad I’m not the only one driven mad by Captcha and other anti-spam-bots.
I hate them too & don’t see the point. Having said that, I’m happy if bloggers want to check that my comment isn’t spam before publishing. I hope your post gets more people to turn it off in their settings!
I agree and, I suspect, I have it. But only as long as it takes me to work out how to turn the bloody thing off. I’ve reverted to blogger and removed DISQUS now the former has – at last – introduced threaded comments. Ironically, one reason I’ve done so is that people were unable to leave comments if they were reading on their smartphone. And as that’s my main vehicle for blog reading/commenting I thought I’d better put my money where my mouth is. Ironically, of course, commenting by phone with captcha is even more of a nuisance…
Sometimes, you can’t win!
And I thought it was just me who didn’t get the letters!
BAN IT!
BNM
I totally agree – don’t have it on my blog because it irritates me immensely (and I frequently don’t comment on blogs that have it)
Keep up the good work!