The CAPTCHA Thing

CAPTCHA was invented in an effort to fight the war against spamming, and other shady activities that involves bots pretending to be humans. So when this feature was added to blogger's comments, i immediately added it to my blog. I remember getting one or two spam comments before that, so I reasoned that it was perfectly reasonable. Everybody else seemed to have done the same.

But then blogger's captcha started to act up. I haven't really identified the problem, but nowadays when I'm commenting on a blog with CAPTCHA, it's almost always the case that my first attempt to enter the challenge code will fail and I will have to re-enter a new one. It can get really frustrating sometime.

I realized that a CAPTCHA challenge, though trivial to use, (for a human, that is. ;p) poses an irritating usability barrier to a feature that's used very often, such as the blogger comment form. It is perfectly necessary in sign-up pages and other sensitive pages that a user will use once or a few times while using the web service, but beyond that, I think we have to find of a perfect balance between being spam-proof, and being user-friendly. Now in the case of this blog, which is low-traffic, the serious problem of spam is yet to really show up. And frankly I think I can get away without having CAPTCHA in the comments.

So a month ago I removed CAPTCHA from Wandering Geek to make commenting easier and faster. I realize that I'm monitoring my comments anyway (both thru blogger's comments feed, and the comments email notification) so in case any spam gets through, I can easily delete it. Honestly, if it makes things easier for readers, I don't mind doing that.

This is a lesson in designing a user interface: sometimes we think too much about solving an "expected" problem that in doing so we alienate the very people that we are designing the user interface for.