Captchas: Is it just me, or are they getting harder to read?
I recently signed up for a trial of SmartSheet (review forthcoming), and it took me three tries to get past the "captcha," the distorted numbers and letters I had to type to prove to the sign-up system that I was a human.
I'm a person, dammit. You can tell because I'm cursing at the screen. If you make the text any harder to read I'm going to take my personal business elsewhere. Then you'll have nothing but the robots to keep you company.
Related: I also tried to get my new laptop setup on the cellular network today, which required calling up the carrier and reading two long strings of digits off the bottom of the laptop that were so small I needed to use my glasses like magnifying lenses. Since the numbers are embedded in the hardware, why couldn't some software send it over the Web and sign me up that way?
It's a bad day for eyeballs.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
they were impossible to read - sometimes it wasn't a matter of simply figuring
out what the letters and numbers were, but more a matter of whether
they were actually all letters and numbers and not just a nice piece of abstract
art to look at while I'm registering.
Which would be nice. Just don't make me interpret it. I have enough of a hard
time reading as it is.