Help! The captcha picture used to verify new users isn’t very clear!

Sometimes this kind of thing is worth a laugh, but more often than we’d care to admit they reveal some of our biggest failings:

Bots, and the damage they cause, are not the fault or responsibility of individual users, and it’s totally unfair to expect them to take the responsibility. They’re not the fault of site owners either, but like it or not they are our responsibility — it’s we who suffer from them, we who benefit from their eradication, and therefore we who should shoulder the burden. And using interactive authentication systems such as CAPTCHA effectively passes the buck from us to our users.