Yeah, you need to protect your site from bad people. I get it.
But think about it this way. There are bajillions of websites on the internet, so chances are, you need ME a lot more than I need YOU. And if you make registering to your site ridiculously difficult by using a captcha that is illegible or just plain DOESN’T WORK, guess what! I won’t sign up for your site!
I usually give it about five tries, which is five times more than the average person would give. But after five times of being shown flh438gf, typing in flh438gf, and being told that the correct answer ISN’T flh438gf, I get very annoyed.
The worst offender for this used to be Rapidshare, who (for their free service) wouldn’t let you download something without decoding a captcha that consisted of a a bunch of numbers/letters with ridiculously distorted pictures of animals on them, and you were supposed to only type the ones that had cats. All the animals looked more like squiggles than animals. The captcha looked like this:
[caption id="attachment_40" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Rapidshare's cat captcha"]
[/caption]
As you can see, that would be a problem.
Luckily, they got rid of it a few months after they started using it, probably because it got hacked. I’m assuming it wasn’t because people hated it. After all, who cares if the users are unhappy? We have enough anyway!
So, in the true spirit of the Internet, here’s some free publicity for the websites that can’t make themselves USABLE!
(This list will grow, trust me.)
