sunday, january 29, 2006
Ranting on a nice spammy day
As the friendly automaton behind a support email address (these are only my personal opinions, by the way), I see maybe six or seven challenge-and-response emails a day. I believe the makers of anti-spam solutions did not design for efficiency on the sender’s end. Not that I would expect them to. They all suck.
Besides having a doubly-stupid name, they don’t use a standard email address (like person@choicemail or choicemail@domain) so I can’t filter them out along with the other anti-spam emails. I don’t want to fill out a “Reason for contact” — it’s enough that I have to type in a random string of numbers. Eight numbers is too long, anyway; the eye processes things in groups of three or four (note license plates and telephone numbers). Is this “notification” by email or in the browser? Ambiguous language. Crappy form. Suck.
Earthlink Spamblocker (image edited to remove addresses):
These fill in your “name” for you, but don’t accept periods as part of a name, so I have to re-type it every time. I don’t want to type in a “short message” when the email has already been sent. The best thing about these is that I’ve only seen three or four different CAPTCHAs in the dozens of times I’ve filled out their forms. Can’t bother to generate random images? Suck.
These ugly CAPTCHAs are often hard to read and I have to do it a couple times to get it right. The “Sending confirmation” title is weird and ambiguous. Mostly, I don’t like having to stare at fuzzy letters. Suck. But I think they made “tira-teima” into the Portuguese equivalent of “challenge-and-response email”, which is an unwieldy phrase. So I like that.
A simple form and an easy CAPTCHA make things nicer. I like the familiar-word approach because I don’t have to peer at each character while I type it. The pre-selected confirmation email checkbox is annoying, though. I don’t want a verification email, so I have to mouse over and uncheck it every time. Half-suck.
comments (8)
suck suck suck suck suck.
– Phil on 1/30/2006 09:01:38
Wow, I've never seen you so angry about a topic before. #3 is by far the worse because that CAPTCHA is illegible.
"Let's make this process agitate the user and then we'll make it impossible to complete the process 33% of the time. Brilliant!"
– shawn on 1/30/2006 09:05:33
And yes, you said suck a whole crazy lot of times. The half-suck was a nice touch.
– shawn on 1/30/2006 09:06:08
hmm! i'm really not that angry; it was an experiment in rant, with "suck" for effect.
– britta on 1/30/2006 10:42:13
i'm not going to read all cause i'm lazy and wouldn't understand it, but i'm sorry you're distressed. i think i just saw you say more angry words or semi-expletives or whatever suck is in one blog post than in my whole life.
– lizzy on 1/30/2006 18:23:20
Wow, even you sister thinks that post was a cry for help. :)
It was a good post with plenty of detail - don't mind us.
– shawn on 1/30/2006 19:23:32
Agitated looks good on you.
– Phil on 1/31/2006 12:47:07
You have good points. Some people get paid really well to do these kind of critques... Do they offer a major in human-computer interaction or user experience design at your school? ;-)
– havalina on 2/1/2006 17:41:10
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
