Many bloggers use free Feedburner RSS to Email service to develop a RSS mailing list. But complex captchas could be ruining all your efforts by making it difficult for keen visitors to become your email RSS subscriber.
Solve Difficult Complex Captchas
We used the Feedburner email subscription tool for RSS email subscription for several years since 2006 when it launched. But after several complaints from users unable to solve the captchas, I tried to sign in on our email form, and this is the pop up which usually appears …
Is that an h or l and i?And I got the captcha wrong. Then I got another captcha, which again entered wrong. The alert advised me to relaod the window to get a new captcha image.
I kept on reloading to check the the variety of captchas, and though some were easy, many were too complex to be understood in one go. Below are some samples of difficult to solve image captchas.
Losing email subscribers
No one will be motivated to subscribe after 2 captchas wrong, however good the content maybe. I understand solving captchas are useful to identify humans from spam bots, but making captchas too difficult just defeats the purpose.
There is a need for double opt in of email subscribers to avoid spam mailings. I realized how difficult it is to subscribe to our site – enter email address in sidebar form > pop up asks for captacha > wrong text > New captacha > Lucky to get it right (or repeat with new captcha) > confirmation email sent > click confirmation link in your email. If you really, really, really like our site so much, you might have gone through all that!
Google Feedburner Email services is a great free tool with lots of features, and we have been using them over several years, but losing subscribers due to complex difficult captchas is not a good idea. At least like Recaptcha (another Google service, which sometimes also has difficult captchas), there should be clear refresh buttons to get new images, and a clear call for ‘clear audio’ output. I really hope Google takes all the right steps to improve this great Feedburner service, its a big asset to them, with millions of users.
Email to RSS Alternative Services
Meanwhile in search for an alternative email RSS tool, we gave a repeat try to Feedblitz (this does not affect current subscribers in any way), which was the initial popular rss to email service we used several years back and even have 280 loyal Feedblitz readers from 2006-2007! A guest author posted that Feedblitz seems better and Feedblitz is also quick to compare with Feedburner. They present multiple options to subscribe, the management, features and email newsletter reporting stats also seem much better, but importantly have easier captachas.
However, Feedblitz is not free (unlike the Google Feedburner List) and after a 30 day free trial, and charges based on number of subscribers, comparable to other email list services like Aweber, Mailchimp etc. But the pricing page reveals that if you are an old time blogger – “FeedBlitz ad-funded free services are available to existing free-service publishers with active newsletters created at FeedBlitz prior to January 1, 2009“. So we use it free.
What is your say on complex captcha issue? Post a comment.