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I hate captchas. There must be a better way of dealing with bots on web sites…

My latest disagreement with them has come tonight whilst trying to open a YouTube account. Quite apart from my problem with being able to read the stupid badly formed letters on random coloured backgrounds I apparently don’t meet their criteria for opening an account, getting only a COPA message - “Sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register for YouTube.com.”

What information? Given that it’s COPA (obviously some stupid American thing), I can only assume I’m not old enough… Ah yes, that would be it. The drop-down list for the year starts with 2006 (they obviously get a LOT of 1 year olds trying to access YouTube) and I accidentally forgot to switch. Whilst I’m at it, the month and date fields are the wrong way round also.

I corrected my mistake and tried again, ensuring that the year was correct, but got the same message. A quick check of the TOS shows that at 31 I should be acceptable. I wonder why they don’t like me.

So, in the space of 2 minutes a popular web site annoyed me in the following ways

The worst thing is that although the site asks for my age, there is no way (currently) to verify it! It’s like buying beer - “Are you over 18?”, “Yes”, “Here you go”. If I was 15 and wanted to use the damn site I’m pretty sure I could guess an age to enter…

Now, if only there was some way of authenticating to web sites and passing attributes to them, and have those attributes validated by a third party if necessary. Something like a digital analogy of an identity card…

Addendum:I notice I’m getting a few hits on the site from Google searches. Guess I’m not the only one seeing this. What are YouTube doing?

Addendum 12/10/06, 22:52:I’m still getting a lot of hits from searches on this. Does anyone know what the problem is?

Addendum 25/10/06, 14:37:Hurray! A few days ago whilst tidying up my gmail account, I noticed an email from YouTube a few months back, welcoming me to the site. Obviously I couldn’t remember my username and password so I went onto the site and requested that they email my username to me. That finally arrived today. Obviously the problem all along was that I’d already registered with that email address. Thanks YouTube, for such a sensible message.

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