On Mar 19, 2006, at 1:41 AM, Mark Gallagher wrote:
A little
uncalled for? Especially when you're asking someone to go to
a significant amount of additional effort to support a feature which
is probably required by very few people?
No. There are legitimate reasons for people to browse without
images on
(being blind is a rather good one), and blaming the victim of our own
carelessness is *not* appropriate.
There is a vast minority of people who can *never* browse with images
on.
Now, I'm
not clear on whether this Captcha is displayed every time
you make any contribution, or only when registering an account, but
if it's the latter, then it seems almost *everyone* could manage to
get images to display once for the purpose. Blind people aside, of
course.
People on old computers that can only run Lynx?
It's 2006. There are adolescents younger than "old computers that can
only run Lynx". People who do not upgrade their computers for twelve
years are not likely Wikipedia contributors. If you have an
idiosyncratic preference for 1980's-era technology, don't expect us
to indulge it--especially not at the cost of developer time and
effort that can be used to benefit the Wikipedia in far better ways.
CLI fanatics who prefer to only run Lynx are probably a bigger
constituency, but even that is an idiosyncratic preference we can't
be expected to indulge.
People on poor connections?
A Wikipedia captcha page presumably loads two images: the Wikipedia
logo and the captcha itself. Perfectly feasible, if sluggish, on 28.8
dialup. If your connection is slower than that, you probably wouldn't
be contributing anyway.
People in a work environment that enforces "no
image
browsing"?
People in such a work environment have that enforced policy because
they should be *working*, not goofing off on the Internet. If that's
a problem, their problem is with their employer, not us.
Now, it may well be that we *need* to use captchas and
other things
that
break in browsing environments other than
the-best-browser-on-the-most-modern-OSes. But tt's one thing to say
"gee, we're sorry you can't register an account, but we have no
choice,
because of vandals and that", and another entirely to say "get a
better
browser and stop being difficult, you jerk".
"Try using computing technology that was invented within the past
half-decade" is not an unreasonable request. "Devote volunteer
developer time and effort building features so that a small number of
people using 1995-era technology can contribute to Wikipedia" *is* an
unreasonable request.
All a captcha requires is images and forms. I have a Power Mac 6100
from 1994 that had Netscape 4 on it, and probably Netscape 3 before
that. It supports images and forms perfectly well. If we need to use
things that require, at minimum, a 12 year old computer running 8-10
year old software, we're not the ones being unreasonable. If we wrote
the whole wiki in Flash or something, or used AJAX extensively, that
would be silly and unreasonable.
--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch