I was shocked to see a CAPTCHA this morning when I stumbled a post not yet in the SU database. StumbleUpon to me was and is the one social network where I hadn’t come across reams of spam or annoying behaviour. The overall experience there has been so smooth and enjoyable that I wondered just how they managed to keep the spammers at bay. Obviously they’re attracting the wrong attention now because this morning I was presented with a CAPTCHA twice when I discovered new content.
Illegible StumbleUpon CAPTCHA
A slightly more readable StumbleUpon CAPTCHA
Those CAPTCHAs look like the one on Matt Haughey’s post. I guess StumbleUpon were using ReCAPTCHA too? Thankfully they stopped and the last post I stumbled (Matt’s post above) had a big empty space where the CAPTCHA had been. Please SU, don’t bring the CAPTCHA back!
Thanks Mark for the link to Matt’s post.
They also implemented the captcha system for sending messages within SU which I thought was a fairly good idea but that seems to have gone now too so I can only assume they had a lot of complaints. You can’t easily ‘spam’ in StumbleUpon because there is no form of mass communication.
CAPTCHA is an awesome concept but why do they have to make the graphic so very hard to read? I’m nearsighted making it difficult getting CAPTCHA right on the first attempt. I prefer the math question to CAPTCHA.