Trillian – unhelpful
15:17 Saturday 30 Jun 07
Go to the Trillian website.
Realise their help manual is woeful
Go to their forum
Try to search and you have to complete a captcha
Get it wrong
Try again
Get told to wait because you can’t search again so soon.
How damn stupid is that?
Buy next version of Trillian? Not a chance.
Edit: It’s little things like this that irritate me hugely.
There is a forum I use which has at any time something like 500+ users online at any time. It’s phpbb. Search is not crippled with a captcha. So why the trillian ones?
It’s not that I am averse to building what I want. I have a build of Miranda which took me ages to get right. Lots of fitting the pieces together for the free software to work perfectly as I wanted. I was happy to do that because at no time did I feel someone was getting in my way. Someone chose to have that captcha.
It’s not that I won’t look – I was trying.
It was that I wanted help, I wanted information and the people that I gave money to for a program put a completely unnecessary hoop in the way and told me to jump through it. There is no justification for that stupid little image.
1
i was also on the forums yesterday and noticed the captcha. that is the dumbest thing i’ve ever seen, and you’re right, just another hoop to jump through when i’m trying to look for a quick answer. what sucks even more, is usually it takes a couple searches in a forum to narrow down to exactly what you are wanting. that’s at least 2 extra hoops to jump through.
but, it’s a fine product for me. so unless something better comes out, i’ll be sticking with trillian, especially astra. it’s nice and much more lightweight so far. thanks ;)
16:54 Saturday 30 Jun 07
2
Captcha is unfortunately a necessary evil. Having done a bit of coding yourself you can see how easy it is to write a registration bot. Captcha just puts a barrier of varying complexity in the way of the bot that makes it that bit harder to spam the forum which happens a lot on successful or popular boards.
You only have to go through that once to register and to get your help. If you’re complaining about that then you’d be pretty annoyed having to click through the potential spam which hasn’t yet been deleted by a moderator.
One string to input for you versus many more spam posts to delete for the moderators.
According to your logic you might as well not have to register at all… just pick a unique name, password and write a post.
20:24 Wednesday 5 Dec 07