Animated Captcha:- Hell On A Stick.

[Hypognosis]

I had occasion to visit my hardly-used Yahoo account the other day and came dangerously close to losing my sanity.

The animated catcha appeared at some stage and, no matter how many times I entered the 7 characters which were bold and bouncing up and down (and twisting) -exactly as they appeared-, it kept telling me "Invalid entry".

1. Are the letters drifting from left to right, in the background expected as well?
(this cannot be as the pattern means you cannot tell what sequence to type them in)
2. Why is there no guide as to what letters are wanted and what to ignore, or a worked example?
3. Why does the "Help" page state that the code is not, repeat NOT, case sensitive when the captcha displays mixed case letters?
4. Why, in the name of Hendrix did they use indecipherable baby speech for the audio captcha? The background babble includes a repeated "wahn" sound, so I cannot tell if that is one of the required number sequence or not!

5. Judging by my google results, the tech geeks are very smug about already having code to 'crack' these new captchas while real people are stuck, trying to legitimately get into their own accounts! Are Yahoo aware of this??

[rockyracoon]

I think I have captcha dyslexia, it always takes me half a dozen times to get it right.

[Old_Geezer]

I've not come across that yet but as a general rule it seems to be the trend to be content to make life hell for other people just so long as it may alleviate an issue someone else has, even for a little while.

I sometimes wonder if it my age but it seems across all areas folk just go around making things worse for their own reasons. I think it might be that eventually one must learn to ignore and avoid the insanity of the rest of the world in order to stay sane oneself.

[factor-fiction]

I really struggle with them too. Sometimes it's impossible to tell whether it's a g or a 9, or a 6 or curly b, for example. I have tried choosing the sound option but I'm clearly hard of hearing too as I struggle to hear those.
I don't know why they don't ask a simple question such as 3+4 =

[AB Editor]

There are no good Captchas.

We use password entry for form submission (like the reports form) for this reason.

[Hypognosis]

@Ed

and you have our eternal gratitude for that. :-)

[AB Editor]

I do feel your pain - it annoys me especially when it's the "recaptcha" style ones with a picture of someone's house number as well as some traditional capthca style text. These are used in part to test Google's numbers-in-photos recognition technology - so while you're using this stuff you're actually working for them.

I have no problem with the price of Google's "free" products being data - but they shouldn't be allowed to make any of it feel like you're actually working for them!