"Content is out of control..."

by Danielle Cooley

Gerry McGovern is no stranger to LCMS, and some results from his recent survey of Web professionals are relevant to our mission here.

Content is out of control in many organizations. One respondent sums it up as “Too many people are busy putting up content without reflection, instead of asking themselves "why".” Another laments “Old content that no one wants to take responsibility for and the original content provider has moved on or retired.”
Often organizational ego is behind content bloat, as articulated by this web professional: “Making sure the public facing content is for the public. We have internal departments that insist they need a public facing website when all they offer are services to our other departments.”

It's so true, of course. The Kansas State University Library case study provides one example of this, along with some great ideas for bringing an organization around to the idea of Less Content, More Strategy.

Ticketmaster loses CAPTCHA!

by Danielle Cooley

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/captcha-22-when-online-security-hurts-sales

Yep! LOVE to see a major e-retailer getting on board with this!  (They're not tossing the concept entirely - just replacing the useless "type these unrecognizable characters" with a much-easier-to-solve puzzle or question.

As with any content, there are costs and benefits to having a CAPTCHA. The main benefit, of course, is keeping bots away from your transactions. (Though they can be hacked, so that benefit isn't as absolute as one might think.) The cost is in paying for the service itself (probably not much) and in risking alienating actual paying customers who get frustrated when they can't figure out the CAPTCHA.

Image via http://blog.formstack.com/2012/10/18/good-bad-captcha-guest-post/.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe your paying customers are SO motivated that they will go through 1,000 CAPTCHAS if that's what it takes to buy something from you. (But probably not.) Maybe you are such a hacker target that you really really need a reverse Turing test, even if it's flawed and alienates some customers. (But probably not.)

While I'll concede there are absolutely legitimate uses for reverse Turing tests, there are better ways than CAPTCHA to handle the spam/bot problem