Release Notes February 23 2006

rainforest1155

Thanks for the fast fixes/implementations. Now here are my thoughts on this:

I'm not to fond of this new helpie popup thingy so far. First of all the performance in IE6 is really bad. Showing the popup takes 20% of my CPU and when I move my mouse over a keyword list this results in taking up to 100% of my CPU. Therefore it's really sluggish and no fun at all so far.
Next thing is that you have to improve the positioning of the popups. They shouldn't lay over the word I have my mouse on. This happens especially when I approach the word from the top.

The captcha will definately hold back the spammers, but I think it's to aggressive. I'm running 1280x1024 here which is kind of the standard resolution for most of the TFT's nowadays, isn't it? I find some letters difficult to read already, even though I'm sort of used to these things. It's just too small.
I don't know yet, but did you exclude characters like 'I' which can be mistaken as '1' (have seen the 1 already)?

Here are some examples and what I found difficult about them: (maybe it's just the sun which is currently blocking my view a bit, because it's out for the first time in a couple of days) - for some this might be obvious, but also think of the average internet user.

1. I or 1? I know it should be a 1
2. I've no clue about the 2nd character :dunno
3. 2nd character E or F? sure it should be E
4. P or F? Is the 3rd character clearly V?
5. last one 6, 8 or B?

I think you know where I'm headed.
Can we please turn this thing off/on via customizations? I problably don't need it at the moment, because except for the mass spammer I haven't received a single spam comment yet. Perhaps spamers are now about to discover smugmug, but I would like to take my chances knowing that I can turn the Captcha on whenever I want to.

Also great job on fixing the original related security hole so quick. I stumbeled on it by accident and I'm glad that no one else discovered it yet.

Have a great weekend,
Sebastian

Scala

I agree, the captcha is too hard to read.

Whatever happened to the solution JT suggested, monitoring comment submit intervals and cutting off too eager submitters?

rainforest1155

A few more thoughts on keyword lists in IE6:
I don't know why, but somehow large chunks of keyword lists always slowed down scrolling in IE6 as it took some more CPU. Does anyone know why and how to fix it? Aren't the sizes of the keywords depending on how much pictures exist for a keyword generated on server side? So what's slowing down IE6 - it doesn't have that much impact on Firefox.
Here's a very extensive list of keywords. Try a fast scrolling through this with IE6 and have a look at the CPU usage (reduce the window size in order to get enough to scroll through). Also try hovering your mouse through the keyword grid - it's very painful on my machine (2x 1.4 Ghz P3 while the browser only uses one).

Thanks,
Sebastian

DodgeV83

Just press the "code unreadable" button until you can read it?

Andy

DodgeV83 wrote:

Just press the "code unreadable" button until you can read it?

flyingdutchie

Andy wrote:

It shouldn't be too hard to choose another font for the Captcha. Maybe smugmug can experiment with various fonts and see which one is easiest to read (i needed to do this for the SecureImage on my blog).

rainforest1155

DodgeV83 wrote:

Just press the "code unreadable" button until you can read it?

I know that, but I wanted to present some examples to show that there're many problem cases. Plus I didn't need to click this button very often to come up with just those 5 cases in my first post.
I don't receive many comments and I just don't want to scare of the few people who are actually commenting. With this measure I might end up with even fewer - it's for sure that the number won't increase.
Additionally there's the language barrier. I'm sure not everybody is going to understand the meaning of this thing or the 'code unreadable' button as my native language is German and therefore my family and a lot of my friends grew up speaking German. Not everybody is capable of navigating good enough on an English site to not get frustrated with it.

I would be confused too if I would encounter 5 strange looking characters and an emtpy field when I just want to leave a note. It's definately not Grandma safe yet - to bring out the old poke stick of smugmug about new stuff.

Long story short:

• I want bigger characters
• leave out those that could lead to confusion
• give an explanation of the whole thing for everybody to understand (a link to the help page with a more detailed explanation)
• give us the possebility to turn it off or on whenever we want

That should in addition to the pictures of my first post summarize my whole argumentation on the Captcha-thing from my point of view.

Sebastian

DodgeV83

rainforest1155 wrote:

I know that, but I wanted to present some examples to show that there're many problem cases. Plus I didn't need to click this button very often to come up with just those 5 cases in my first post.
I don't receive many comments and I just don't want to scare of the few people who are actually commenting. With this measure I might end up with even fewer - it's for sure that the number won't increase.
Additionally there's the language barrier. I'm sure not everybody is going to understand the meaning of this thing or the 'code unreadable' button as my native language is German and therefore my family and a lot of my friends grew up speaking German. Not everybody is capable of navigating good enough on an English site to not get frustrated with it.

I would be confused too if I would encounter 5 strange looking characters and an emtpy field when I just want to leave a note. It's definately not Grandma safe yet - to bring out the old poke stick of smugmug about new stuff. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/mwink.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

Long story short:

• I want bigger characters
• leave out those that could lead to confusion
• give an explanation of the whole thing for everybody to understand (a link to the help page with a more detailed explanation)
• give us the possebility to turn it off or on whenever we want

That should in addition to the pictures of my first post summarize my whole argumentation on the Captcha-thing from my point of view.

Sebastian

In a matter of hours Sebastian just murdered Smugmug. First he found a bug where you can download Originals in a gallery that has them disabled, then he systematically explained why the current Captcha system is wrong, and told you how to fix it.

:grim <--- Sebastian

Andy

rainforest1155 wrote:

Long story short:

Sebastian

Thank you, Sebastian. For taking the time to detail exactly how you feel about the new comment anti-spam feature. I'll make sure that the team sees this.

aero-nut

flyingdutchie wrote:

It shouldn't be too hard to choose another font for the Captcha. Maybe smugmug can experiment with various fonts and see which one is easiest to read (i needed to do this for the SecureImage on my blog).

Hmmm, maybe I'm missing something here, but I would imagine that the easier we make it for us to read, the easier it would be for a fairly simple image recognition program to read...thus defeating the purpose of having the thing in the first place. I would imagine there is a compromise to be reached here...some sort of middle ground.

Just my two cents..

rainforest1155

rainforest1155 wrote:

Thanks for the fast fixes/implementations. Now here are my thoughts on this:

I'm not to fond of this new helpie popup thingy so far. First of all the performance in IE6 is really bad. Showing the popup takes 20% of my CPU and when I move my mouse over a keyword list this results in taking up to 100% of my CPU. Therefore it's really sluggish and no fun at all so far.
Next thing is that you have to improve the positioning of the popups. They shouldn't lay over the word I have my mouse on. This happens especially when I approach the word from the top.

I guess my thoughts went unnoticed because the captcha stuff dominated my first post in the thread a bit.
Doesn't anybody else experience these slowdowns and position problems with IE6??
I find it very annoying.

Sebastian

bwg

rainforest1155 wrote:

I guess my thoughts went unnoticed because the captcha stuff dominated my first post in the thread a bit.
Doesn't anybody else experience these slowdowns and position problems with IE6??
I find it very annoying.

Sebastian

i got the same slowdown on the huge keyword list using IE.

however, never using IE makes this not very annoying for me.