CAPTCHA'd

Posted on 23 May, 2008 by maximinus in Web design, Rant, Web development, Interface design

I'm sure you're all familiar with CAPTCHAs - those annoying things which require you to type in a bunch of letters and numbers from an image which tries to make it difficult for computers to read said characters.  I've seen several different varieties - ranging from fairly basic text (which doesn't do much to hamper OCR efforts), through ones which use really curly fonts, lines through the text, shapes intermingled with the characters, ones which have a picture of a cat or a dog on each letter, asking you to enter all those with a cat or all those with a dog.

The original idea behind CAPTCHA systems was good; I agree with it in principle.  However, spammers have found ways around many of them, including "data entry business opportunities" - which they send spam about, luring people to fill in CAPTCHAs for them, for use in submitting spam to websites - or, alternatively, simply getting them to post the spam.  Unfortunately, the trend seems to be to make the CAPTCHAs harder to read, which doesn't cut down on this as much as it would if the spammers were simply using OCR to attempt to decipher them.  All it does is make it more of a nuisance for legitimate users of the system.

My latest struggle with such a system involved an attempt to sign up for a forum account - which took me three goes.  Each attempt involved attempting to decipher a CAPTCHA image, which was so poorly done that 5 and S were utterly indistinguishable (perhaps they would have been, had I seen both at once; however I only ever saw one - (it looked like) the same one, in each of the three instances... I can't remember which it turned out to be).  Not only that, but I had to enter my desired password twice on each attempt, and answer a (fairly straightforward, although sometimes slightly ambiguous) question, which, like the CAPTCHA, changed each time.  I was so frustrated with this that I was going to completely give up on registering if it had failed me one more time.

The biggest problem with this was not even that the CAPTCHA was unclear - it was the fact that I had to attempt not only a new CAPTCHA, but a new human verification question each time (despite having passed the first and second), and re-enter my password a further two times per attempt.  Some systems also offer an audio alternative to the image; this option was also missing from this particular system.  Without this audio alternative, even if I could decipher all the other characters in a given CAPTCHA, if it had an S or a 5 in it, I had a 50% chance of failing it.

I wonder just how many people give up on posting a comment, registering an account or performing some other action on a website, simply because they can't decipher a CAPTCHA image?

EDIT:
Oh, one more thing - Sam Ruby raises a good point, which is highly related to my recent experience - when you've verified that somebody's a human, remember it!  Sure, expiry is probably a good thing - re-check periodically.  But presenting three different questions as well as three different CAPTCHAs and requiring me to type (and thus send via unencrypted HTTP) my password six times in order to register, simply because one of the two forms of human verification is poorly designed?  That's just overkill.

UPDATE FOR TAGGED.COM USERS:
Several people have posted comments stating that they are having problems with a "captcha fail limit exceeded" error on tagged.com.  I have removed all these comments as nobody was getting anywhere.
Tagged.com's help section states that the problem has been fixed - click here for more details.
If you are still experiencing this problem, you'll have to try contacting Tagged's support - click here.  I cannot provide any further help or information, as I am not a user of Tagged.com or in any way associated with it.

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Touchscreen Eee coming?

Posted on 19 January, 2008 by maximinus in Interface design

Well, it looks as if Asus have indeed caught the wave - sources indicate that Asus are currently sampling 4-wire resistive touchscreen technology, for inclusion in a 9" version (this may be the previously-announced 8.9" model, with the figure rounded up - or a full 9" screen - nobody is quite sure yet).  With the manufacturing cost set to only increase by around USD$15 because of it, it hopefully won't impact on the price too much.

Now I guess we'll just have to wait and see both what the screen resolution is and how much a 9" touchscreen Eee will set you back.

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ColdFusion 8 AJAX

Posted on 22 October, 2007 by maximinus in Web design, Web development, Interface design

I've lately been playing around a bit with the new ColdFusion 8 AJAX and related stuff.  There are a few different things I'd like to touch on here:

• cfajaxproxy;
• cfwindow; and
• cflayout / cflayoutarea (tabbed layout)
  

cfajaxproxy
This one's a really great idea - basically, with one tag, CF8 will automatically create a JavaScript class which mirrors the CFC you name.  It acts as an interface for the CFC - you create an instance of it in your JavaScript, and then call the (public, remote-access) methods from the CFC as if from ColdFusion.  It returns whatever the CFC's method would return.

I'm using this to easily turn a static calendar (based on Randy Drisgill's Simple ColdFusion Calendar - I fixed the year bug (my way, see comment on Randy's blog post), converted it to a method in a CFC, changed it to use DIVs instead of tables and generally tidied things up, rewriting some chunks of it.  I then made it so that it doesn't require reloading the page, but instead uses JavaScript to swap out the calendar for a whole new one.  I've yet to make it also display information in the day DIVs, but that will be coming soon.

More at CF8 Livedocs.


cfwindow
This one's also kind of neat; it allows you to easily create a draggable, closable 'window' on the page.  You can either have it show on page load, or use JavaScript to trigger it to pop up whenever and however you want.  You can either specify content within the cfwindow tags, or specify a source file - if you specify a source file, it'll load that page using AJAX and shove its contents into the 'window' - no, not using an iframe, but actually using AJAX.

I do have a couple of gripes with it, though:

• It's not the easiest thing in the world to style, and the default styles are a bit crappy - especially with some colours behind it, which can make some of the outer lines 'disappear' and thus make the box look a bit odd; and
• It doesn't have a 'minimise' button.  It's based on Ext JS - which does have a 'minimise' button, which shrinks the 'window' to its titlebar.

I'm really not sure why there is no way to add the minimise button in the cfwindow tag; it'd be rather handy.  I'll have to have a play and see if I can add it by gaining access to the underlying Ext JS window object.

More at CF8 Livedocs.


cflayout / cflayoutarea
Okay, so I've only actually used the tab layout so far.  But even so, I've discovered a few cool things and a few annoying things.  First off, it's really easy to use these tags; just nest a new cflayoutarea within the cflayout tag to add a new tab.  Just like cfwindow, you can either specify the contents of each tab between the cflayoutarea tags, or use the 'source' attribute to specify a file which will be loaded in using AJAX.  With both cfwindow and tabs, you can also use refreshOnActivate (refreshOnShow for cfwindow) to tell it to fetch a new copy of the contents (when using 'source') when opening the window / showing the tab.

Issues I have with the tabbed layout are:

• The tabs are rather poorly styled by default; the top left corner of each tab in particular looks odd / broken.  Thankfully, FireBug showed me that it's relatively easily to restyle the tabs - I've made mine quite plain and simple at the moment;
• The 'align' attribute of the cflayout tag relates to the tab content, not the tabs themselves - surely if I wanted to change the alignment of the content, I'd do it at the content level - or perhaps there could be an 'align' attribute on the cflayoutarea tag?  Tabs are stuck at the left hand side, unless you manually shift them with CSS as I have done; and
• There appears to be some weirdness with regards to the height of the content area when it contains absolutely positioned elements.  I'll need to investigate this a bit further.

More at CF8 Livedocs - cflayout and cflayoutarea


There may be more later, but right now I can't think of anything to add.

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Xtraordinary Complexity

Posted on 23 August, 2007 by maximinus in Web design, Rant, Web development, Interface design

Last weekend, Xtra performed an email system "upgrade" which resulted in their customers' mail being inaccessible for 24 hours.  This in itself is not necessarily bad - they did give warning that it was going to happen, and it's understandable that such things need to be done from time to time.  The problems begin with the length of the outage - a full 24 hours, with some customers having no access for longer than this.

The main problems, however, relate to the consequences of this "upgrade" - and begin with those who use a mail client (i.e. not webmail) to access their email.  As part of the upgrade, Xtra changed their SMTP server address - and added mandatory SSL.  They do inform you (oddly enough, when you're trying to get to the "upgraded" webmail - but also over the phone if you lie and tell them that it's not to do with the mail server "upgrade" and thus can get through to a person rather than pre-recorded messages) that the address has changed - but never make mention of SSL.  They list the new port (465) and address (send.xtra.co.nz) but completely fail to mention that SSL is now mandatory.

This is a problem for those users - like my aunt, who has been unable to send email for several days until I was able to visit and sort it out - who do not know a lot about computers, the Internet or email, who perhaps, like my aunt, have had their computer set up by family or friends and know how to use it but not how to configure it.  In the case of my aunt, she managed to work out where to change the settings - with some help - and changed the address and port.  However, since there had been no mention of it at all, she did not enable SSL - and so still could not send email.  Although I know a bit about mail servers etc, and in fact run my own mail server, I didn't immediately recognise port 465 as being the standard SMTP over SSL port.  How anyone else is supposed to work it out, I don't know - a bit of deft googling managed to turn up this article on the Xtra site which eventually mentions that you need to enable SSL.


The next problem, which is probably even worse than that one, relates to the web mail system.  It used to be a relatively simple process to get to and use their webmail system - but no longer.  Especially if you haven't used the new system yet.

First off, you need to use a modern browser.  If your browser isn't supported, it doesn't tell you - it just sticks you in a loop of signing in, clicking through to continue a couple of times, and then being returned to the login page.  Once you find a browser in which it works, you have to go through several steps of pointless nonsense, including downloading and installing a few bits and pieces relating to their new "bubbles" - this took a few minutes on my aunt's ADSL connection; I shudder to think how long that would take on dialup.

Once you've finally managed to register for the new system, you log in and end up on an overcomplicated, customisable start page.  When you eventually locate the "Mail" link, and you move your mouse over it, a new box "slides" out from under it to reveal a summary listing new messages - just how good this is, I'm not sure, as my aunt had no new messages, so there was a large box with a small amount of text swimming in it to that effect.  Clicking on the Mail link took us to the new webmail interface - which I didn't have a good look at, but didn't look terribly easy to use or particularly good.  I think it might be using the current Yahoo! mail system, but, not having a Yahoo! account myself, I can't verify this.


Then there's the entire concept of a social networking site.  I would imagine that their users would fall into two broad categories:

• Those who, like my aunt, are not at all interested in this crap; and
• Those who are interested in a social networking site, and, as a result, are already signed up to at least one of the plethora of other free social networking sites out there

Also - I haven't investigated, so don't know if this is entirely accurate - surely using this system would be somewhat pointless, as I'd assume that only Xtra customers can get a "bubble page" or whatever it is they're calling them.  Even if other people can sign up for them, will anybody who's not an Xtra customer do so?  I would suggest that the answer is almost certainly "no" - at best, a few people might sign up out of morbid curiosity.  This means that you're essentially restricted to networking with other Xtra users - whereas if you use any of the other social networking sites out there, you can network with anybody with access to the Internet.


I'll admit that their old webmail system was old and was begging to be upgraded or replaced; but this is not the way they should have done it.  What they've done is alienate a lot of users, confuse many more and just brass off the rest.  That's just those of their customers who actually use their Xtra mail, of course - the rest of their customers won't even care in the slightest.

I think I heard that Xtra were saying that "Bubble" was going to provide "an exciting range of new services that will change the way you use the internet" - I'd say that the only way it has changed the way that some people use the Internet is which provider they use it through.

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Progress Bars

Posted on 14 August, 2007 by maximinus in Rant, Interface design

Currently preparing a machine for re-use by a new staff member who'll be starting tomorrow, I'm thus stuck uninstalling a bunch of no-longer-needed software (and will shortly be installing some more software).  This means that I'm once again faced with progress bars.

On the whole, they're a great idea - they give some idea of how long something is going to take.  However, a lot of companies - Microsoft being a big one - seem to be unable to use them properly.

A progress bar should fill up throughout the process - starting completely empty, and ending up full just as the process is completed.  Microsoft (and others), however, take various non-intuitive approaches which ruin the entire point of the progress bar:

• Progress bar fills up completely long before the process is complete - often with a message along the lines of "Time remaining: 0 seconds"
• Progress bar does not fill up, but rather has a small bar which scrolls along and back repeatedly (or just scrolls one way repeatedly)
• Progress bar fills up - then starts all over again for another sub-process, perhaps with a message indicating that it's now doing some other sub-process
• I have nothing against this, so long as there's also an overall progress bar - which there generally isn't

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head - there may be one or two other strange behaviours also.

All of these abnormal behaviours add only confusion to the system - not information, as a properly-used progress bar should - and, in my opinion, should be avoided unless there's a very good reason.

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Beeping Mad

Posted on 13 February, 2007 by maximinus in Rant, Interface design

So, after I thought I'd managed to get pretty much everything on my replacement work PC set up the way I like it, I noticed that the machine seemed to be beeping a lot.  One of the main causes was new mail arriving - any time a new message arrived, a beep would emanate from the PC speaker.

Somebody on IRC (xslogic) suggested that it was because I didn't have a sound card (well, not installed, anyway).  I checked, and sure enough, the sound card drivers didn't appear to be installed.  I installed them, only to find that Windows sounds would now attempt to play through the PC speaker - for everything like opening a folder or a page loading in IE, and whatever else Windows makes annoying noises for.  I then changed the sound profile to "no sounds" so that these annoying noises no longer existed, and thought that was that.

Much to my dismay, it wasn't long before I received another email - and heard another beep.  This I couldn't understand, since it could no longer be due to Windows, but must now be Outlook itself doing this - and on the old machine I'd had no such problem.  After some serious option-diving, I found the culprit:
Tools->Options->Preferences (tab)->E-mail Options...->Advanced E-mail Options...->When new items arrive
This has three checkboxes: "Play a sound," "Briefly change the mouse cursor" and "Show an envelope icon in the system tray."  I unchecked the first two and left the third, since it is still good to be able to tell at a glance that there's new mail.

Note: This is Outlook 2002 (XP) - this setting, if it even exists, may be located elsewhere in other versions.

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Movable Madness

Posted on 8 January, 2007 by maximinus in Rant, Interface design

Which idiot at Microsoft decided that in Office applications, not only should you be able to move toolbars around (with no way to lock them in place) - but also the menu bar?!
Seriously - who on Earth is going to want their menu bar running down the side of the window?  Or along the bottom?  Even better yet, I can even detach it from the window completely, and have it float somewhere - even off on a different screen to the application itself.  Why would anybody EVER want to do that?!

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Stupid Systems

Posted on 18 August, 2005 by maximinus in Rant, Interface design

Why do major organisations use such stupid systems? Why do they never seem to be thought out properly?

Yesterday, I went to get my learner's license. I got there after 4pm, and as such was told that I would have to come back as their system doesn't allow times after 4pm. So I went back this morning, look tee test, and then had to wait for nearly 15 mins to get my temporary license, because their system is so limited that it only allows specific times to be entered - presumably only quarter hours. This fiasco meant that I arrived late for the first lecture of the day, though I didn't miss much.

If their system had been thought out properly before it was created, they would be able to cut the crap and issue the temporary license when the test is passed rather than a random amount of time after, and would also be able to keep issuing licenses (at least learners' licenses) until just before they close for the night, rather than having an hour and a half where they have to tell people to bugger off and come back some other day - and I would have had my temp license yesterday and not been late for class.

Also, when the woman took my bag to put it behind the counter, she didn't first make me place any cellphones etc in it, so I had my phone, pda and mp3 player on me during the test... And she found it so heavy that she dragged it along the desk, nearly pulling out the glass panel in the top of the desk, then at the end had to bring it around the counter to give it back... Good thing I only brought the textbook for one of the two classes with me today, I suppose...

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