Store Fronts: A Story about reCAPTCHA

I don’t know how often you non-robots do reCAPTCHAs but you know that one where you have to click a bunch of things (e.g. store fronts, it’s always store fonts), then wait, then click the store fronts in the new images that have just loaded? That’s the worst one. The others, they’re all okay. But this one, this one is fucking terrible.

It’s the worst because you have to wait. They can’t just switch to the next image instantly. No, you have to wait like five seconds. And sometimes you’ll have to do it multiple times, too. You click the store front. You wait five seconds. It’s another store front. You click. You wait. It’s another one. You click. You hope that it’s not another store front but Google’s like fuck you and it never ends!

Sometimes the square stays white for longer than usual! Google just hates you in particular that day!

I’d rather do the other captcha tests multiple times. Those ones are so snappy. Like, click click click and it’s done. Doing that three times in a row, (and sometimes I have to, because I suck at human, or rather sometimes things look like store fronts but aren’t) at least there’s interaction going on for the whole time! You don’t have to just sit there and stare at your shitty shitpost and re-evaluate what you’re doing with your life. But I get this test the most!!

It’s true that this is probably the hardest one for bots to do. By varying the amount of time, Google makes it so that the programs don’t know how long they have to wait. But seriously, give your users a break… let me just… shitpost…

You know what my personal hell will be? Store fronts. Store fronts all day all night. I never want to scrutinize an image and try to determine if that grey-ish wall thing is a store or if it’s just a fucking building ever again. Street numbers are better! Mountains are better! I’d rather see a river any day!