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Know your target audience too. I'm not sure if I'm it, but reCAPTCHA gives me enough friction that I often abandon pages with it. Simply using Firefox's antifin

Know your target audience too. I'm not sure if I'm it, but reCAPTCHA gives me enough friction that I often abandon pages with it. Simply using Firefox's antifingerprinting feature plus some ad/tracker blocking is enough for it to be miserable every time.

mister_hn 6y ago
I abandon every website that promotes free trial period but asks directly for your credit card. Absolutely a no-go: let me first try it for free and then I will add the credit card details, if I'm interested
- mushufasa 6y ago
  Then you may not have the problem deeply enough to need the solution. It depends on a lot on the context B2B vs B2C, but I've experienced that the B2B customers who won't sign up without an absolutely free trial are much much less likely to convert anyways, to the point where it's not necessarily worth the effort for sales + support.
  - Retailer 6y ago
    In B2B, it could be that the person who wants to try out the service is an employee of a company. He/She needs to first test the service before trying to convince their manager (or the company) to subscribe. Such people might not have a corporate credit card to put in, could be company policy that such subscriptions are handled by a different department. They might also not wish to use their personal credit card for corporate services.
    - fragmede 6y ago
      For large values of B, in B2B, employees have corporate cards, with discretionary spending, so that's something to consider. A SaaS product with annual purchasing, priced just under the discretionary spending limit (read: an employee can buy this and their boss will just rubber-stamp the request and not even give it a second thought), is far easier a purchase. However, if corporate has to get involved, the effort is approximately the same wether it costs $1,000 or $10,000 because a bunch of people have to get involved, committees formed, and studies done.
  - randall 6y ago
    Also files under #chargemore for B2B, etc.
  - baddox 6y ago
    I don’t understand. The only reason it would be beneficial to ask for the credit card now instead of later is if you’re hoping the customer simply forgets to cancel. It signals to me as a customer that you’re not confident that your free trial will convince me to pay.
    - travisjungroth 6y ago
      The ease of conversion is definitely a component. And that has a few parts. Maybe you hope that people forget they don’t want it (like you said). There’s also hoping they don’t forget they do want it. People are pretty lazy and forgetful. There are other components. Credit card entry acts like a captcha, but it’s actually a useful part of the process (unlike clicking street signs). And the marginal cost of a free trial is low, but it’s not zero. If I can have less free trial customers but end up with similar paying customers, that’s a win. There’s not only one reason.
    - mgreenleaf 6y ago
      Sometimes it is used as a verification of "uniqueness", since someone could sign up for multiple free trials using different emails. Not a problem for most products, but can be a pain.
      - mister_hn 6y ago
        In that case, something like electronic ID or webauthn might solve the problem?
    - dangrossman 6y ago
      Suffice it to say, this has been heavily tested by thousands of businesses, and there's hard data behind many of those that land on requiring a card on file up front that has nothing to do with hoping people forget to cancel. It's about activation rates. If your service requires the user do some initial setup work to get value from it, like integrate your whatever into their website, they're MUCH more likely to follow through on that work after having given you a credit card to sign up (and perhaps had to discuss with their boss or IT dept or whoever to approve using the company card).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - capkutay 6y ago
    Yeah I think there’s a general lack of understanding that leads inexperienced product people to believe that friction is always bad. Good friction (verifying emails, asking a question in the signup form, collecting a CC upfront) can result in more paying customers as you’re optimizing your experience towards people who are actually interested in buying your service. Rather than trying to cast a wide net and wasting resources on poor leads who want zero friction.
    - paulie_a 6y ago
      I typically disagree with free trials for B2B. The user has no skin in the game and the account will go by the wayside.
- macu 6y ago
  This issue came up for me recently when signing up for Audible. You get 1 free audiobook/month but have to verify a credit card before the free trial month. I imagined this was to cut down on users who sign up with throwaway accounts to get free books. What gets me is you can buy $10 prepaid credit cards and sign up repeatedly anyway, spending your $10 elsewhere. Completely opposed to the practise, however, when it enrols you in automatic payments which you have to opt out of before your free trial expires.
  - mgbmtl 6y ago
    Have you tested this? Prepaid cards usually don't support subscriptions, which is a way of avoiding that. (I work with handling online payments, and tried this before, but it failed for my test-case)
    - gramakri 6y ago
      Do you know if stripe supports identifying these cards?
      - mgbmtl 6y ago
        I haven't tested it with Stripe, but according to their docs, yes: https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a-customer-is-using https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a...
onemoresoop 6y ago
I hear you, but do you have another solution to fix spammers invading a system? reCAPTCHA is annoying but I understand what it solves, I do type away.. And it’s true, sometimes I give up too.
- DenisM 6y ago
  What’s the harm? Depending on your functionality there is hardly any downside to allowing multiple ghost accounts.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    True that! Had a discussion along that line just earlier today about the contact us function on my website. Worst case, I get some more mails in my spam folder. I can live with that, checking it every two weeks or so doesn't hurt.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    I used to run a forum for an indie videogame with a small but passionate userbase. Unfortunately it was completely overrun by spambots to the point that moderators couldn't keep up and they drowned out the real posts. We had to shut it down.
    - RyJones 6y ago
      This is one of the reasons Begg Knives shut down his forums. We literally couldn't delete accounts fast enough.
      - ValentineC 6y ago
        When I used to manage web forums, I ask a hard question during signup and put the answer within the question itself (e.g. "hint: the answer is xxx"). This usually stops simple spam bots that are aimed at that particular off-the-shelf forum software.
    - AQuantized 6y ago
jraph 6y ago
Spread the word. The more we are saying this, the more developers will think "We have a problem, but reCAPTCHA is not a solution for this problem. reCAPTCHA spies on our users and makes them waste their time, while our first goal is to respect them. I support people who run away from tracking and reCAPTCHA makes their lives miserable. We can't use this. And by the way, I myself hate checking road signs and shop fronts, I'm definitively not inflicting this curse to even a very small fraction of my users". My bank once required me to fill a reCAPTCHA to change my password. Yes, Google's tracking on my bank's website. I asked my financial adviser to reset my password for me to increase the cost of using reCAPTCHA for my bank. I told them it didn't work because of reCAPTCHA not working on my computer, which is actually true because I block it.
- rattray 6y ago
  Is there another solution to this problem that is a sufficient replacement for 90% of situations?
  - xur17 6y ago
    Since solutions for recaptchas can be purchased, I'm starting to wish I could just pay the market rate (< $0.01 each) instead of having to solve the damned things.
  - jraph 6y ago
    My assumption is already that reCAPTCHA is not a solution. Your question would, then, be "Is there a solution". You may not agree and I respect this, but this is actually my point (and I don't have an answer to this question - I wish I had, though, and you have a point!). I wish that people stop thinking soon that reCAPTCHA is a solution at all. Then, it will open people to start thinking hard on this problem and hopefully find good solutions that fits their exact situation. There may not be one size fits all, but many good solution for each situation. We would not know without thinking.
    - rattray 6y ago
      Got it. Bummer. I wonder if you could ask the user to trace a shape/pattern with their mouse? Or you draw a few animating dots with a canvas, and ask them to click the blue ones? Fundamentally, though, you likely either piss people off by challenging their humanity, or violate their privacy by silently tracking their behavior, or break accessibility by evaluating the way they interact with your site against "normal" (bad for folks with screen readers, lynx, etc I'd assume).
RonanTheGrey 6y ago
Nobody here is talking about the elephant in the room where reCAPTCHA (and hCAPTCHA has the same problem) is concerned: The other day when Google was having issues (the same day that a bunch of Android apps were crashing due to a bad map data push), I was unable to log into my bank, unable to pay my electric bill, and a half dozen other things I needed to do that day. Because Google's servers were down, core service providers were unable to do anything either because they block access to their site without recaptcha approving the entry. To me, as a technologist, as a builder of software, this is absolutely and entirely unacceptable. Captcha needs to be something you can self host. I don't understand this habit of handing Google a knife and then telling them where to stab you.
- twic 6y ago
  A sensible person would implement the use of the captcha to fail open - if Google is down, then let the user in without passing a captcha. Was this a mistake on the bank's part, or Google's?
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Only if the probability of failure makes the extra effort worth it. Since this is a pretty rare event, a sensible person could well wait until they see actual impact before putting in the work. Hypothetical problems always vastly outnumber actually experienced ones.
- vosper 6y ago
  It's surprising to me that on-prem reCAPTCHA isn't a service that seems to exist (based on a quick search). Even if it's not Google's reCAPTCHA - is it so hard to make something like this that only Google can provide it? Surely the big players would want this component under their control exactly for reasons like "we don't want to have an outage due to a provider outage". Or at least, fail over to a less-preferred backup. Like if Cloudflare had such a service.
  - fragmede 6y ago
    Cloudflare looked at the options (including building their own) and moved to hcaptcha (but mostly because Google wanted to charge them money), so it must be hard at that kind of scale, since bot writers are monetarily incentivized to defeat the captcha. https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...
zitterbewegung 6y ago
I don't know about everyone else but a few months ago reCAPTCHA was getting so hard that I was routinely failing it . Now the hardness seems to be scaled down though. (they removed the addition of noise into the picture I believe).
- greenshackle2 6y ago
  Same for me. I haven't been CAPTCHA'ed in a bit but the last few times were absurd. I had to solve 6-10 screens probably cause I was failing. I was getting questions where I'm just not sure what the right answer is. Which pictures have traffic lights? And then some pictures where I can barely make out a traffic light far away in the background. Does this count? Which pictures have busses? Is the blurry white vehicle a large passenger van or a small bus? I don't know. Then the most absurd one, I was asked to select tiles containing a bicycle, on a picture like this: https://www.bikecleveland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Sharrow-300x300.jpg https://www.bikecleveland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Sha... Does a representation of a bicycle count? I don't know. And then when there is just a few pixels of an object going into a tile, am I supposed to select it?
- andrewstuart 6y ago
  I've had recaptcha just go on for minutes. Here's a video (not mine) of the sort of thing I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGBsopLvwwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGBsopLvwwo
nullc 6y ago
> I'm not sure if I'm it, but reCAPTCHA gives me enough friction that I often abandon pages with it. Likewise. It's randomly difficult to get through, and if you have third party content blocking it just doesn't show up. I just hit back pretty often just counting the times I knew it was there any was a reason the page wasn't working.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mister_hn 6y ago

I abandon every website that promotes free trial period but asks directly for your credit card. Absolutely a no-go: let me first try it for free and then I will add the credit card details, if I'm interested

mushufasa 6y ago
Then you may not have the problem deeply enough to need the solution. It depends on a lot on the context B2B vs B2C, but I've experienced that the B2B customers who won't sign up without an absolutely free trial are much much less likely to convert anyways, to the point where it's not necessarily worth the effort for sales + support.
- Retailer 6y ago
  In B2B, it could be that the person who wants to try out the service is an employee of a company. He/She needs to first test the service before trying to convince their manager (or the company) to subscribe. Such people might not have a corporate credit card to put in, could be company policy that such subscriptions are handled by a different department. They might also not wish to use their personal credit card for corporate services.
  - fragmede 6y ago
    For large values of B, in B2B, employees have corporate cards, with discretionary spending, so that's something to consider. A SaaS product with annual purchasing, priced just under the discretionary spending limit (read: an employee can buy this and their boss will just rubber-stamp the request and not even give it a second thought), is far easier a purchase. However, if corporate has to get involved, the effort is approximately the same wether it costs $1,000 or $10,000 because a bunch of people have to get involved, committees formed, and studies done.
- randall 6y ago
  Also files under #chargemore for B2B, etc.
- baddox 6y ago
  I don’t understand. The only reason it would be beneficial to ask for the credit card now instead of later is if you’re hoping the customer simply forgets to cancel. It signals to me as a customer that you’re not confident that your free trial will convince me to pay.
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    The ease of conversion is definitely a component. And that has a few parts. Maybe you hope that people forget they don’t want it (like you said). There’s also hoping they don’t forget they do want it. People are pretty lazy and forgetful. There are other components. Credit card entry acts like a captcha, but it’s actually a useful part of the process (unlike clicking street signs). And the marginal cost of a free trial is low, but it’s not zero. If I can have less free trial customers but end up with similar paying customers, that’s a win. There’s not only one reason.
  - mgreenleaf 6y ago
    Sometimes it is used as a verification of "uniqueness", since someone could sign up for multiple free trials using different emails. Not a problem for most products, but can be a pain.
    - mister_hn 6y ago
      In that case, something like electronic ID or webauthn might solve the problem?
  - dangrossman 6y ago
    Suffice it to say, this has been heavily tested by thousands of businesses, and there's hard data behind many of those that land on requiring a card on file up front that has nothing to do with hoping people forget to cancel. It's about activation rates. If your service requires the user do some initial setup work to get value from it, like integrate your whatever into their website, they're MUCH more likely to follow through on that work after having given you a credit card to sign up (and perhaps had to discuss with their boss or IT dept or whoever to approve using the company card).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- capkutay 6y ago
  Yeah I think there’s a general lack of understanding that leads inexperienced product people to believe that friction is always bad. Good friction (verifying emails, asking a question in the signup form, collecting a CC upfront) can result in more paying customers as you’re optimizing your experience towards people who are actually interested in buying your service. Rather than trying to cast a wide net and wasting resources on poor leads who want zero friction.
  - paulie_a 6y ago
    I typically disagree with free trials for B2B. The user has no skin in the game and the account will go by the wayside.
macu 6y ago
This issue came up for me recently when signing up for Audible. You get 1 free audiobook/month but have to verify a credit card before the free trial month. I imagined this was to cut down on users who sign up with throwaway accounts to get free books. What gets me is you can buy $10 prepaid credit cards and sign up repeatedly anyway, spending your $10 elsewhere. Completely opposed to the practise, however, when it enrols you in automatic payments which you have to opt out of before your free trial expires.
- mgbmtl 6y ago
  Have you tested this? Prepaid cards usually don't support subscriptions, which is a way of avoiding that. (I work with handling online payments, and tried this before, but it failed for my test-case)
  - gramakri 6y ago
    Do you know if stripe supports identifying these cards?
    - mgbmtl 6y ago
      I haven't tested it with Stripe, but according to their docs, yes: https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a-customer-is-using https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a...

onemoresoop 6y ago

I hear you, but do you have another solution to fix spammers invading a system? reCAPTCHA is annoying but I understand what it solves, I do type away.. And it’s true, sometimes I give up too.

DenisM 6y ago
What’s the harm? Depending on your functionality there is hardly any downside to allowing multiple ghost accounts.
- hef19898 6y ago
  True that! Had a discussion along that line just earlier today about the contact us function on my website. Worst case, I get some more mails in my spam folder. I can live with that, checking it every two weeks or so doesn't hurt.
- jbay808 6y ago
  I used to run a forum for an indie videogame with a small but passionate userbase. Unfortunately it was completely overrun by spambots to the point that moderators couldn't keep up and they drowned out the real posts. We had to shut it down.
  - RyJones 6y ago
    This is one of the reasons Begg Knives shut down his forums. We literally couldn't delete accounts fast enough.
    - ValentineC 6y ago
      When I used to manage web forums, I ask a hard question during signup and put the answer within the question itself (e.g. "hint: the answer is xxx"). This usually stops simple spam bots that are aimed at that particular off-the-shelf forum software.
  - AQuantized 6y ago

jraph 6y ago

Spread the word. The more we are saying this, the more developers will think "We have a problem, but reCAPTCHA is not a solution for this problem. reCAPTCHA spies on our users and makes them waste their time, while our first goal is to respect them. I support people who run away from tracking and reCAPTCHA makes their lives miserable. We can't use this. And by the way, I myself hate checking road signs and shop fronts, I'm definitively not inflicting this curse to even a very small fraction of my users". My bank once required me to fill a reCAPTCHA to change my password. Yes, Google's tracking on my bank's website. I asked my financial adviser to reset my password for me to increase the cost of using reCAPTCHA for my bank. I told them it didn't work because of reCAPTCHA not working on my computer, which is actually true because I block it.

rattray 6y ago
Is there another solution to this problem that is a sufficient replacement for 90% of situations?
- xur17 6y ago
  Since solutions for recaptchas can be purchased, I'm starting to wish I could just pay the market rate (< $0.01 each) instead of having to solve the damned things.
- jraph 6y ago
  My assumption is already that reCAPTCHA is not a solution. Your question would, then, be "Is there a solution". You may not agree and I respect this, but this is actually my point (and I don't have an answer to this question - I wish I had, though, and you have a point!). I wish that people stop thinking soon that reCAPTCHA is a solution at all. Then, it will open people to start thinking hard on this problem and hopefully find good solutions that fits their exact situation. There may not be one size fits all, but many good solution for each situation. We would not know without thinking.
  - rattray 6y ago
    Got it. Bummer. I wonder if you could ask the user to trace a shape/pattern with their mouse? Or you draw a few animating dots with a canvas, and ask them to click the blue ones? Fundamentally, though, you likely either piss people off by challenging their humanity, or violate their privacy by silently tracking their behavior, or break accessibility by evaluating the way they interact with your site against "normal" (bad for folks with screen readers, lynx, etc I'd assume).

RonanTheGrey 6y ago

Nobody here is talking about the elephant in the room where reCAPTCHA (and hCAPTCHA has the same problem) is concerned: The other day when Google was having issues (the same day that a bunch of Android apps were crashing due to a bad map data push), I was unable to log into my bank, unable to pay my electric bill, and a half dozen other things I needed to do that day. Because Google's servers were down, core service providers were unable to do anything either because they block access to their site without recaptcha approving the entry. To me, as a technologist, as a builder of software, this is absolutely and entirely unacceptable. Captcha needs to be something you can self host. I don't understand this habit of handing Google a knife and then telling them where to stab you.

twic 6y ago
A sensible person would implement the use of the captcha to fail open - if Google is down, then let the user in without passing a captcha. Was this a mistake on the bank's part, or Google's?
- wpietri 6y ago
  Only if the probability of failure makes the extra effort worth it. Since this is a pretty rare event, a sensible person could well wait until they see actual impact before putting in the work. Hypothetical problems always vastly outnumber actually experienced ones.
vosper 6y ago
It's surprising to me that on-prem reCAPTCHA isn't a service that seems to exist (based on a quick search). Even if it's not Google's reCAPTCHA - is it so hard to make something like this that only Google can provide it? Surely the big players would want this component under their control exactly for reasons like "we don't want to have an outage due to a provider outage". Or at least, fail over to a less-preferred backup. Like if Cloudflare had such a service.
- fragmede 6y ago
  Cloudflare looked at the options (including building their own) and moved to hcaptcha (but mostly because Google wanted to charge them money), so it must be hard at that kind of scale, since bot writers are monetarily incentivized to defeat the captcha. https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...

zitterbewegung 6y ago

I don't know about everyone else but a few months ago reCAPTCHA was getting so hard that I was routinely failing it . Now the hardness seems to be scaled down though. (they removed the addition of noise into the picture I believe).

greenshackle2 6y ago
Same for me. I haven't been CAPTCHA'ed in a bit but the last few times were absurd. I had to solve 6-10 screens probably cause I was failing. I was getting questions where I'm just not sure what the right answer is. Which pictures have traffic lights? And then some pictures where I can barely make out a traffic light far away in the background. Does this count? Which pictures have busses? Is the blurry white vehicle a large passenger van or a small bus? I don't know. Then the most absurd one, I was asked to select tiles containing a bicycle, on a picture like this: https://www.bikecleveland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Sharrow-300x300.jpg https://www.bikecleveland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Sha... Does a representation of a bicycle count? I don't know. And then when there is just a few pixels of an object going into a tile, am I supposed to select it?
andrewstuart 6y ago
I've had recaptcha just go on for minutes. Here's a video (not mine) of the sort of thing I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGBsopLvwwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGBsopLvwwo

nullc 6y ago

> I'm not sure if I'm it, but reCAPTCHA gives me enough friction that I often abandon pages with it. Likewise. It's randomly difficult to get through, and if you have third party content blocking it just doesn't show up. I just hit back pretty often just counting the times I knew it was there any was a reason the page wasn't working.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]