Aral Balkan

Why didn't anyone tell me there was a pissing contest on to create the freakiest captcha ever? Or that the folks at Shozu had won with the following manly specimen?

Shozu's a great mobile application that lets you upload your photos to Flickr from your phone. So what were they thinking with this captcha?

Update: I'm on the second step of the form and it gets worse. Here's the next screen:

Notice the blatant violation of the Innocent Until Proven Guilty principle (it's warning me from the outset that I've entered an invalid phone number when I haven't done anything yet). And there's another Captcha! WTF? Why two captchas? Surely, you can't get to the second step if you haven't passed the first step and, if you've passed the captcha in the first step, then surely you're human (or superhuman, in this case!) Not to mention the fact that you can only access this page by logging into your account in the first place.

Is there a crazed, out-of-control captcha developer loose at Shozu? Someone call the captcha police!

Comments

• I don't know where that first Captcha came from. You should go from entering your email details to the phone number page without that 6-image Captcha. And the phone number page should start by asking you for your phone number, so we can send you the download link, not accuse you of not being able to follow simple instructions! I'll talk to our support guys about this tomorrow. If you could contact me, or post on http://forum.ShoZu.com about it, so we can get some additional information about how it happened, I'd appreciate it. That way we can make sure everyone only gets the one Catpcha we mean them to. As for why it's so weird... One day we came into work to find a huge spike in new accounts from one particular domain. For some unknown reason someone had made a bot that was attacking us and creating as many accounts as it could. We had a simple Captcha at the time, but evidently it wasn't working. Nobody at ShoZu is an expert on image processing, so we knew we couldn't disguise letters with a weird background well enough to stop these bots. So we came up with this two-stage Captcha. We're actually rather proud of the solution. Instead of making it very hard to read the letters, we just get you to lookup what a symbol stands for. And so far it's kept the bots out. Of course if your disagree, please contact me or post on our forum about it. Russell K Bulmer russell.bulmer@ShoZu.com Senior Product Manager ShoZu

  by Russell K Bulmer on 2007-03-08 23:12:31

• Hi Russell, I was using Safari at the time. I just tried again with Safari and this time, the grid of phones was corrupted and I couldn't select the N73, which was hiding behind another of the phones. I selected another phone and sure enough, I got the captcha only once this time. I don't remember what was different about the first time but I remember answering other questions along with the first captcha (I hadn't logged in in a while -- perhaps something changed in the system and required me to enter more information to update my account?) Or maybe it's Safari-related weirdness? In any case, I love the Shozu mobile application. It's way more usable than the built-in Flickr application on the N73 (and isn't just for Flickr either!)

  by aral on 2007-03-08 23:27:46

• I hope it's not a Safari issue. Seriously: my boss is a Mac type of guy. Before he joined our Mac support was "Get Firefox". He made sure that changed alirght! These days we're supporting Safari properly, so I'll be letting our support guys know about your problems. Glad to hear your enjoying using ShoZu. I hope you've got it set up to post directly to this blog! :)

  by Russell K Bulmer on 2007-03-08 23:56:53

• Well, that's certainly an original approach! reminded me slightly of this xkcd cartoon from last friday: http://www.xkcd.com/c233.html :)

  by Tim on 2007-03-12 17:25:38

• [...] My co-developer forwarded this blog entry to me and I just though that it was something I can learn a lesson from. [...]

  by Daily Bitekletas » Blog Archive » When Captchas goes bad.. on 2007-03-14 08:43:24

• LOL -- thanks for sharing, Tim!

  by aral on 2007-03-14 23:31:54

• lol... that's funny. Know of any K2-compatible Captcha plugins?

  by pj1115 on 2007-06-09 20:38:57