30 July 2009
Small things: Login process in Digg.com
Welcome to another installment of the Small Things series. This time the tale is about news aggregation giant, Digg.com, who for some reason seems to be shooting itself to the leg by introducing CAPTCHA to the login process.
The sole reason of existence for CATPCHA is to shoot down non-human users, since the computer supposedly can’t figure out the actual letters/words in CAPTCHA field, thus it’s usually used in user registration forms. Though, I’m not sure how long this feature has been in the login form since I really haven’t logged in to Digg for a while.
Now, while I’m sure there is some sort of reason to this kind of use (one being bot(s) using “fake” accounts to login and digg up certain stories) I’m not so sure if the end result is right on this occasion. The immediate effect on myself was that after several attempts to trying to remember my password I eventually gave up and moved on without ever logging in. Why? One of the reasons was clearly the habit of logging in generally includes entering your username and password and pressing enter, first I didn’t even see the whole field completely. When I noticed the CATPCHA test I practically gave up after trying two times. Why? Because even though the process of trying couple of different mutations of the password is not that complicated and tedious, the CATPCHA instantly morphed the whole task into something that really demands my immediate attention to get through the simplest of tasks in online world.
Could this be avoided? Why not just use the massive statistics that is the backend of Digg and just start forming patterns? At some scale this is already done, confirmed by Kevin Rose at Diggnation (in some random episode), then apply that data and try to force diggers who always end up digging the same stories to do the CATPCHA before digging. If they fail repeatedly that would identify them as bot accounts, which could lead to suspension. It’s hardly a perfect solution but it’s something that wouldn’t punish the regular users.
Rule of Mint: If you have to start complicating the user experience because of a small group of users, and thus penalizing the larger part of the audience, there’s inherent problems within the system itself.
I’m trying to view this in the 6.3.2.5 revision of the opera web browser and the content looks rather broken up. You should probably it out.
Oh, damn. Sorry, didn’t get notification of your post for some reason. :/
Yeah. First of all, apologies of that problem. I am aware of the situation but so far the users using Opera has been really minimal. Secondly, the other themes that I’ve found, that would somewhat fit into my usability expectations (it’s a UI/usability/UX design blog after all), are just not as slick, so I’ve been going on with this theme.
And currently I really don’t have time to create custom theme (I have started it but would need the time to finish it some point) AND since Wordpress isn’t really doing too good of a job performance wise (specially in the HTTP requests), I’m thinking of going to straight up PHP framework so that I can get the site as fast as possible.
All of this is in the pipeline but still waiting for the opportunity to do something about it.
As for the Opera situation, I’ll go looking again for new theme and/or try to look up some fixes for the current theme about the Opera stuff. Again, sorry for the problems you’ve been having. It’s a real bummer for me to know that some people can’t just view the content I’ve been putting up there.