Philip Welch wrote:
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.
<snip>
I've been forced to use Lynx over sluggish SSH tunnels before. With image-only captchas I'd be locked out in the cold, dark and wet.
If you've actually bothered to read [[CAPTCHA]], you'll realise that they're a pain in the arse, you insensitive clod.