Monday, September 01, 2008

Why I Hate CAPTCHAs

I was reading my Google Reader feeds while eating breakfast this morning. The puppy, Dustmop, was laying on my feet. That has no relevance except that when she got up, my feet were cold. I found a post on Lifehacker that I wanted to email my wife. Google Reader Mobile doesn't seem to have the ability to email a post, but the feed item itself had a Feedburner link for "Email This." I did so. I entered my email address and my wife's email address. I neglected to include a message text, because I didn't care. I figured that my wife can put together the point of emailing this link to her from the link itself. However, Feedburner insisted that I enter a message. I typed the letter "m", mostly because it was closest to my finger at that point in time. Hey, it's Labor Day, and I'm trying to save some labor! I then entered the freaking CAPTCHA, only to get the message

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Figure 1: The Message

I checked and double checked, entered and reentered the freaking CAPTCHA, all to no avail. The message "Please enter the characters displayed in the box. If you are unable to see the text clearly, you may reload this window for a new image" kept appearing even though I had entered the text displayed on the screen. I tried two CAPTCHAs, and it took neither.

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Figure 2: The Characters Displayed in the Box

By this point, I gave up and came upstairs to email the Lifehacker post from my laptop. I hate CAPTCHAs. Most of the time, even if I can clearly read them, the script won't take my answer. I quit using Blogger because of this.

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