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When creating an account users should only have to solve CAPTCHA once
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Description

This one may sound weird if you haven't been to editathons with newbies. "You only have to solve the CAPTCHA once", you think. Well, yes. If you do it correctly on the first try. In the several editathons I've been where I've instructed people on how to create a new account, they almost never manage to do it on the first try -- either because they try a username that is already in use on another wiki (see related T90732 and which I noticed we don't have AJAX warnings for) or because their passwords don't match up. What happens then is that the form is loaded again, with an error message on top, while the password fields are cleared and they get a new CAPTCHA to solve. I strongly believe that if they already solved a CAPTCHA -- even though the password or username were wrong -- the CAPTCHA has served its purpose in proving that the user is in fact human, so they should only have to fill it in once.

Event Timeline

jhsoby raised the priority of this task from to High.
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Aklapper raised the priority of this task from High to Needs Triage.Mar 17 2015, 11:59 AM

This seems to cover two aspects:

  • Username already taken
  • Passwords incorrect

What I tried in Firefox 36:

Account creation error Username entered already in use. Please choose a different name.
So I cannot reproduce that problem (e.g. cf. T73744).
Which browser and which website is this about?

But entering two different passwords only creates a warning after solving the capture indeed:
Account creation error The passwords you entered do not match.
That part could indeed be better, and that is covered by T19544.
Hence merging into that task.