Thursday, July 26, 2012

Sorry about the captchas

        I first connected to the net in 1992—via a modem that screamed along at 400 baud. On 23rd March 1994 I saw a demonstration of a graphical web browser—Mosaic 1.0—and knew that the Earth had moved.

        I was one that got part of the future right. PART of it. I saw the potential of people forming social groups all across the world and sharing their lives, even if I didn't foresee that the whole community would one day be at the mercy of a nerd from Harvard. What I didn't see was that the web would lay waste to the following industries: Newspaper publishing, Bookselling, Travel agencies, Directory and Almanac publishing, General retailing, and I'm sure I forgot one or two. Neither did I see that people would find so many ways of being BLOODY ANNOYING on the net.

        Until Geo complained about the captchas that commenters to this blog have to wrestle with, I didn't even know there were any. I assumed it was an optional feature I could turn on if need be. Today I turned them off and within half an hour had spam from payday loans, rayban sunglasses, and rzb-b コーチ バッグ, whatever that is. A sex aid, probably.

Captchas are back on. Sorry about that.

3 comments:

Geo said...

Expat - It wasn't so much a complaint, per se, as it was an observation about the tenacity of the particular captchas I tried to get through here earlier. I found it sort of amusing in light of your comment noting 'if you can get through the captchas that are reminiscent of junkyard dogs' about Bara's blog. I know how necessary they are in many cases. Not a problem. It's only that every once in a while I find some that are next to impossible to comprehend. Proving you're not a robot is one thing, but damn! :)

expat said...

I couldn't agree more, Geo. I understand the need, too, but they get ridiculous.

WildCard said...

Captchas are a necessary evil unfortunately. I recommend that people after they type their comments quickly hit Ctl+a Or highlight all your txt and hit Ctrl+c(to copy all of their written text) THEN wrestly with the captcha. I forgot this step and had to rewrite this comment AFTER getting the captch wrong a couple of times :(. Oh and dont forget to either right click and "paste" or hit Ctrl+v to put your comments back in the box in case it gets erased.
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