Captchas are those scrambled words and box that some websites force you to deal with in order to complete their forms. Developers use them because they help stop the spambots from filling up their databases and email queues with junk data.

Why are they stupid? Because they shift the spambot problem away from the developers and onto the visitors.

The thing is — it’s not the visitor’s problem. It’s not my problem. It’s your problem and you, as a developer, should deal with it. I don’t care if you’re using my captcha response to digitize books or provide water for kids in Africa. Visitors shouldn’t be at the mercy of high-and-mighty developers who’d rather tinker with their controllers and models and database schemas. I’ve been witness and victim to too many lazy backend developers who unloaded their problems onto other people.

Developers: figure it out.

I know what you’re thinking — Facebook, Google, Twitter — the big boys all use them. Try this thinking instead: your users. Anything that stands in the way of an awesome experience that lands on my desk gets an automatic veto. It doesn’t matter if it adds another day or another week to the project. I don’t care about your development hurdles, I care about generating revenue and 100% of the time that depends on user experience.

The visitor interaction of whatever software you’re developing is what counts. Visitors fill out your forms because they want to interact with you, and more likely your boss. Capturing their data, making that process as simple as possible, that’s more important than not capturing the spambot’s.

#devhell #webdev