Probably the wrong place to ask this, but what the hell....

I tried to log on to the Mail's site to make a comment about one of their stories. It wasn't going to be anything too nasty (sadly). So... I made my comment, did the stuff about inserting my name and e-mail addy (kosher ones too) and ended up having to go through the hoops of "type below the letters you see above you" .. you know, one of those kind of things. This was a complete sod because a) some of the letters/numbers bore no relation to ones I recognise, and b) I did this about 10 times and eventually got pissed off with it and gave up.

Is this the norm? Some kind of trick to keep people away?

_________________
The footless path has many leghorns

It's called a captcha. Because spambots trawl the web looking for places to dump their links, many websites have these image verification system on the basis that spambots can't read them but humans can.

Sadly because robots become a bit more advanced the masking has to get harder to read which can lead to letters that look like a 1 year old scrawled them.

Usually you should have success within 2 or 3 goes, unless you're really unlucky and get consistantly shit ones.

It's to stop spambots posting spam automatically.

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I wonder if the DM could be prosecuted under the Disability Discrimination Act for not offering an aural alternative to the panels for the visually impaired, as is getting increasingly popular.

Granted, it's not just the DM that could be stung by that, but it'd be an interesting exercise.

BoB :

gds9......looks like a snake with arms folded

Why do they bar spambots? Surely whatever they have to say is more valid than the average DM reader.

I suggest the Express messageboards, God knows there's room if you're not trying to squeeze on the maddie boards (any thoughts on democracy in Burma anyone?..... anyone???)

v1agra
mature woman bent over desk tefal
hot babe in nurse outfit
littlejohn for president
labour is shit
cia1i5

I wonder if they'd notice


Maybe we could do a hidden message mind, sorta like this with mailwatch as the first letters.


Completely random example:

My my what a surprise.
Another tragic story.
I am really not shocked at this.
Likely they'll get away with it too
We can't trust the government anymore
And the police are just as bad!
To think we trusted them
Cowardly bunch they are
Hope they get voted out soon!

It'd be more discreet in a rhyme mind.

Or Daily Mail Haiku?

I think the internet is generally exempt from ever having to provide anything for the disabled, except for government websites.

There was something a few years back where it was going to be made a legal requirement to have all websites "accessible". I don't know what happened to it, but I assume that they backed down on it.

It takes a large amount of effort to accessiblise a website, I very much doubt it would be enforced since 95%+ of websites would be sued.