This page is currently a copy of a diary article wrritten on 2 December 2023. It may grow.

A lot of the useful web pages recently have come from Stackexchange. Sounds like a good idea to sign up with them.

Oh. Are you a bot? Please look at this CAPTCHA and tell me which of the images contains a crosswalk.

No, stackexchange, I'm not a bot. I'm also not a US American, so I'm not really sure what a “crosswalk” is. But I am sure that I find it insulting. So what if 100 bots sign up for stackexchange? There are other, less obtrusive ways to deal with them (rate limiting, for example). So I haven't signed up.

I've been ranting about CAPTCHAs for nearly 15 years, and I still don't know why people use them. Yes, I understand the idea: to stop servers being bombarded by messages from bots. But that doesn't explain why they're used mainly for signup purposes. I have even had to fill one out to buy things online. Surely the people who have something to sell don't want to chase away their customers. And if 100 bots come and buy something, fine, as long as their payment credentials are OK.

My guess is that the people who do this kind of thing haven't really thought it through. There's still this big discrepancy between real life and the world view of a “webmaster” (though that's becoming an old, worn-out magic word).