Painful Forum Registration

[Pony99CA]

I help administer the forums at pocketnow, so I thought I'd register here in case I have any questions. (For the record, I also use phpBB at my site.)

My problem was the forum registration. That captcha was a huge pain. I'm nearsighted and had great difficulty reading the images (I had to refresh them several times). Even when I thought that I could read one, I was wrong four or five times.

I understand the purpose of the captcha, but come on, make it a bit easier. What are people with limited vision supposed to do? (I might have missed that option.) People have to pay for this software, and they shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get into the forums. I understand that you don't want spam here (who does?), but please consider a bit more friendly captcha.

You should also state whether the characters in the image are case-sensitive or not. If I see "n2WE3g", I assume that I have to enter them that way, but it's always better to state that explicitly (especially if some of the images can have all capital letters).

Thanks,
Steve

[Steve Machol]

vB has many captcha settings that allow the Admin to make this as easy or as difficult as he wants. The problem is that the easier you make it, the easier it is for bots to bypass it. However this is entirely within the Admin's control and this is off by default.

I do agree that it should state that this is not case-sensitive.

[Pony99CA]

I Wasn't Clear

vB has many captcha settings that allow the Admin to make this as easy or as difficult as he wants. The problem is that the easier you make it, the easier it is for bots to bypass it. However this is entirely within the Admin's control and this is off by default.

I understand about the bots (I get them, too), but maybe I wasn't clear. I'm concerned about the captcha for this forum. Can the admin here turn the difficulty down?

Yes, more bots may get through, but, as I said, people are paying for vBulletin, so they shouldn't have to jump through hoops to register here. I almost gave up after having four or five failures (and having to refresh the images more than that because I knew that I couldn't read so many of them).

And what is the process for truly visually impaired people to register here?

Thanks,
Steve

[Steve Machol]

Ah, I see. Unfortunately our forums are a major target for spammers and there is no way to reduce the captcha settings without opening us up to a lot of potential problems.

You did mange to register and in all honesty we rarely get any complaints about this. Nonetheless I will mention this to the Devs to bring it to their attention.

[Pony99CA]

Ease of Registration

You did mange to register and in all honesty we rarely get any complaints about this.

I appreciate that, but maybe those people who would have complained gave up.

Seriously, while I did manage to register, I thought it was a difficult enough process that I felt the need to post here about it. I didn't have any reason for registering other than for future questions, but if somebody else was coming here to register because they had a real question, maybe they were focused on that and didn't complain.

Nonetheless I will mention this to the Devs to bring it to their attention.

Thanks. I just wanted to bring it up so you'd know one user's experience. I understand that it's a balancing act, but for commercial enterprises, I think you should err on the side of customer ease-of-use. (Free hobbyist boards are another matter, of course.)

By the way, in a former life, I did user interface design and one thing we worried about is accessibility. So if there's not a way for visually-impaired users to register (both here and with vBulletin systems in general), there should be. If I had gotten one more captcha failure, I was going to start looking for that alternative.

Steve

[Steve Machol]

I know that the Devs have been looking at an Audio substitute for this but I belive one of the limitations is that this requires a certain server configuration. At any rate I have brought this to their attention.

[forumguy]

A bot can't read images, can they?

[Floris]

They can analyze it. The form of a one doesn't shape like an eight.

That is why those images have various backgrounds, colors, different fonts, different size, rotations, etc .. to trick the analyze bots

[Mazinger]

I know that the Devs have been looking at an Audio substitute for this but I belive one of the limitations is that this requires a certain server configuration. At any rate I have brought this to their attention.

Wouldn't Audio substitute be more easier to analyze than images?

[Wayne Luke]

Wouldn't Audio substitute be more easier to analyze than images?

Audio is more difficult to compile randomly than the graphics are. While most servers have the software to digitally process images, they do not have audio software. The developers have already committed to developing alternative captcha methods as technology improves.

Post about Audio Captcha

Post about alternative Captcha methods being included in the future