I have some food for thought about the use of the word "captcha" in the Drupal captcha modules.
CAPTCHA is the abbreviation for "Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart". Because it is an abbreviation, it should be spelled "CAPTCHA", (with upper case). In the Drupal captcha module we use "captcha" and "Captcha", as if it would be normal words. Some relevant sites where they use "CAPTCHA": http://www.captcha.net/ (the offical CAPTCHA site), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA .
Should we change in all the CAPTCHA modules the "captcha"s to "CAPTCHA"?
In the CAPTCHA modules we use sometimes the expression "captcha challenge", which is a pleonasm considering the meaning of the abbreviation. Should we change this to just "CAPTCHA"? Maybe just "challange" would also work in some situations.
"CAPTCHA" is a trademark of the Carnegie Mellon University. We should probably take this into account if we do not want trouble about this in the future. E.g. adding "CAPTCHA is a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University" to the help string at admin/user/captcha?
(Edit: typo)
Comments
about the trademark
Check out http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/AuthForInstalledApps.html .
They use "CAPTCHATM" in the beginning of the document
and at the bottom of the page they put
CAPTCHA
+1
... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...
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... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...
Issue
Although I think the "rename" is a good idea, I'm just worried about how it will look when its done. The Drupal standard casing system in the administration system is to have the first letter in the phrase uppercase and the last letters lowercase.... But of course, what happens when we get to abbreviations? For example, Microsoft uses CamelCase, with the .NET Framework, for their abbreviations longer than two letters: System.IO, XmlReader, etc.
Overall, I think the rename would be a good idea. +1. Here's the issue about the rename.
Sorry folks, but for me
Sorry folks,
but for me seems that CAPTCHA looks really ugly in menus IMHO.
There is also this trademark problem with Carnegie Mellon University, and even thinking that this trademark is not really an issue here in Brazil (and almost anywhere in the world also) , it`s easier just to avoid using the Trademark then we are sure we will not run in troubles in the future...
And after all I guess that miscasing captcha is not really an big grammar mistake...
I would still go for it
I don't think it looks "really ugly", just "a bit weird" at first sight.
Even more, now that I am used to "CAPTCHA" from my local branch, "Captcha" or 'captcha" look just wrong to me.
Are you now saying that we should use another word instead of CAPTCHA? Like "SpamBlocker" or "HumanVerifier"?
It doesn't hurt to put "CAPTCHA is a trademark of ..." in the help strings. I don't think we should do more about it.
What's wrong with doing something right? It seems silly to keep an error you know about, just because fixing it looks weird at first sight.
There are a lot of other modules that use upper case abbreviations or mixed case names in their menu items. E.g. I'm maintainer of the "GeSHi filter module" or check out some 3th party integration modules at http://drupal.org/project/modules/category/52 for example.
There have to be a change in some way
Moreover, after most of us in this thread already agreed to do the change, there were already patches that use "CAPTCHA" instead of "captcha". Consequently the current CAPTCHA module contains a mix of "CAPTCHA" and "captcha" usage, which is worse than the "ugliness" of "CAPTCHA" IMHO.
So there have to be a change is some way: change everything back to the wrong spelling or correct the legacy errors.
PS: in CAPTCHA Pack I changed all "captcha"s to "CAPTCHA" already.
I just got this position
I just got this position after talking with Rob about that.
He agrees with me that using uppercase make the things appear really ugly.
Really sorry for wasting the effort you already did in changing the things to Uppercase, but I think we should think a bit more before changing that.
som weight on my side
Well than it's two against one, I guess. ( Rob, I thought you were on my side ;-) )
To put some weight on my side:
After superficial skimming through some modules I found the following ones and they all use some sort of uppercase abbreviations in UI strings (menu items, help strings, etc): SMS Framework, RSS Remote Enclosure, PJIRC, LDAP integration, PhpGedView, netFORUM Authentication, getID3(), FUDforum integration, CRM API, CAS, AES encryption, FCKeditor. there are probalby many others, but it's not worth to track them all.
Jeff Eaton had a presentation at current DrupalCon about the new form API: http://jeff.viapositiva.net/node/531 check out slide 24
And last but not least: it was actually Dries (our day jobs are in the same building) who revealed to me the fact that CAPTCHA is an abbreviation and should be written as "CAPTCHA".
In the end it is correctness/consistency against look. I think we should go for correctness and consistency because the look issues can be solved with other means: e.g. usage of "challenge" instead of "CAPTCHA" to minimize the occurence of "CAPTCHA".
Hmmm...
Maybe we should just bite our lips and make the change to CAPTCHA. I really don't know, it's up to you guys. In the end, it really doesn't matter which one we go with, as long as we're consistent with it throughout the whole module. This decision must be made before 3.0 final.
yes it's difficult
I agree with this, which makes it a critical issue, I guess (although it feels like a minor thing).
I propose the following compromise: go for "CAPTCHA" as abbreviation but replace it with the normal word "challenge" as much as possible/where it is possible in the UI strings.