captcha system frustrates users and is not user-friendly enough
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I have heard from several of our members attempting to sign up about problems with the captcha system. It displays upper case characters but only accepts lower case input. If you communicate this, it would avoid a lot of frustration and potential lost memberships.
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For invitation only membership sites, might you consider switching off the captcha requirement?
Thanks for the feedback. Both of your suggestions make a lot of sense.
Clarence,
I appreciate your weekend reaponse. Its encouaging to see top level engagement and your interest in user friendliness. -TL
I received this comment from a person we invited to join our group:
"I have typed the letters in the image 5 different times to try and "join".....and keep getting an error message. I give up."
I assume this has to do the upper-case problem. If someone is aware of a different issue with the captcha system, I would appreciate suggestions.
What led to my initial post was a pending member that I coached to use lower case. Yet she continues to struggle and still is unable to join after numerous re-trys over the past week. I am told that she is reasonably computer savvy. Her boss (who happens to be the president of this trade association) has requested that she join so she has been more persistent that she otherwise would be. So there seems to be additional issues wit the system.
I wonder how many others suffer in silence and simply give up?
The aforementioned sign-up challenge has been resolved.
I first canceled the initial invitation then sent a new invitation. That didn't help.
I then copied the response link from the pending members page (show link) into an email and suggested she find another computer and type that into the browser. Instant success!
She assures me that her caps lock was off. Who knows why there was a keyboard issue. But that seems to be the cause.
Tom, I tried your first suggestion of having the user make sure to use only lower case letters and that didn't work. We have removed her invitation, as you suggested, and are having her try from a different computer. I have also suggested that she simply go to the home page of our groupsite and join using the "Join Now" link, since we have an open group. I haven't heard yet if that method worked.
Guys,
I agree. While our captcha system is designed to prevent automated signups from non-humans, it is a little aggressive in my opinion and is often difficult to read which could possibly prevent successful signups by real users.
We will be looking into other alternatives. Our first step will be to communicate the lower-case only requirement.
Thanks for your feedback.
Clarence
Everyone,
A few weeks ago we removed the "lower-case only" requirement. Let us know if you're still seeing this problem.
In the meantime, I'll rename the title of this post and move it to a different forum.
We are going to be switching to ReCAPTCHA very soon.
Now is the time to voice any opinions about ReCAPTCHA that you may have.
One user friendly system I've found is used by these folks http://www.linkmarket.net/
They have three easy to read characters to be entered. Works every time for me.
Beyond that, I still wonder if you could avoid using captcha for invitation only scenarios since we are only inviting real people.