Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

Captcha images are quite effective at halting comment spam. However, besides being inherently inaccessible, they're also quite annoying to regular users.

How to maintain a spam-free site, without annoying your users? That's the question.

I wonder when information bars will start being abused by evil people to get users to install their spyware.

Here's an annoyance I've stumbled across multiple times. The Nucleus website uses accesskeys for quick access to the menu items. e.g. Alt-D (Alt since I'm on a PC) will bring you to the downloads page.

Fine. So far. But Alt-D is also a browser-independent shortcut to jump to the location bar. "Browser-independent", as it works the same way in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So, my habit of hitting Alt-D constantly causes total confusion when I do it on the Nucleus homepage: Instead of getting the focus on the address bar, the downloads page loads.

So, why not use Ctrl-L? While in Firefox this is exactly the same as Alt-D, in Internet Explorer it isn't. You'll get the "Open Url..." dialog box instead. Close, but not what I want.

Whats the conclusion? The annoyances caused by keyboard shortcuts overruled by accesskeys are a perfectly good reason to NOT use accesskeys at all, or to limit the accesskey use to numeric values. (and even if you do so, try to stick to some standard assignments)

I'm currently working on account activation links instead of sending a "your password is..." e-mail. The puzzle-pieces are falling together, and here's how I think I'm going to implement things:

• Main idea is to only allow members to log in only if we are sure they have a valid e-mail address.
• Activation links remain valid for two days (48 hours). After that, they are deleted.
• The form where the password can be set will have a plugin hook, so things like captcha images can be added there.