Richard Lynch wrote:
On Thu, November 10, 2005 10:11 am, Jochem Maas wrote:
<rant mode="troll" sarcasm="true" anger="+3" replies="duck">
...
or put another way - is there a good reason why the web should be any
less
discriminating than the rest of society.
Yes.
It's the WORLD WIDE WEB.
shucks, now your getting all pedantic. I really don't think that a few words
and well meant principles should be getting in the way of world-domination and/or
global-brainwashing aspirations of a couple of media-cartels. ;-)
I mean, it's all very well to discriminate against those people way
far away whom you will never see in the first place, but they're not
any farther away any more, are they? :-^
[tongue firmly planted in cheek, folks!]
And if you are a large corporation, you very well may be subject to
laws with significant risks attached ($$$) for not being accessible.
Google for "Olympic Committee blind user Australia big fine" for more
on that topic. That alone makes it worth considering.
Probably the best reason not to use CAPTCHA is that it can already be
bypassed by OCR in most cases by a determined person. (Google for it)
That means that within a very short period of time, script kiddies and
web-POST-spammers [*] will have OCR anti-CAPTCHA technology rolled
into their tool-kits.
Another very good reason is that even normal users have a not-so-good
experience with the damn things. I've gotten way too many
indecipherable images and had to click multiple times to get one that
was usuable in a single session for some stupid forum post I wanted to
contribute. Not my idea of a pleasant web-surfing experience.
Certainly not something that makes me want to contribute more to that
site.
I slapped a CAPTCHA (bad, home-rolled) into a guestbook on a site that
had been targetted and was getting hundreds of junk posts a day -- but
it's not something I deploy as a matter of course. And I don't expect
it to survive more than a year before I have to just get rid of the
guestbook. (Assuming the client keeps the site up at all, which is
under review.)
* So, is there a term for the web moral-equivalent of "spammer"?
Those link-farm visitors who clutter up your site. blammers, perhaps?
(blog-spammers).
blammer just doesn't sound evil enough ;-).
for the rest, good stuff, as usual, Richard :-)
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