{"id":1395,"date":"2014-11-14T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T05:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/?p=1395"},"modified":"2021-11-04T15:24:38","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T09:54:38","slug":"thank-god-google-acquired-feedburner-along-with-its-captcha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/14\/thank-god-google-acquired-feedburner-along-with-its-captcha\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank God Google Acquired FeedBurner Along With Its CAPTCHA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf07.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1910 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf07.jpg\" alt=\"gf07\" width=\"158\" height=\"194\" \/><\/a>When we separated our company blog from my personal blog Talk of Many Things, I had to migrate our business email subscribers from the latter to the former.<\/p>\n<p>Since I couldn&#8217;t find a way to automate this, I resigned myself to doing it manually. Because I&#8217;d chosen Feedburner to manage the feed and subscriptions of both blogs, this process was simple.<\/p>\n<p>I first logged onto my Feedburner admin account and downloaded my personal blog&#8217;s subscriber list as a CSV file. I then picked up each email address from this list and entered it into the SUBSCRIBE box provided by Feedburner on GTM360 Blog. When I&#8217;d first signed up for Feedburner for Talk of Many Things several years ago, clicking the Subscribe button at this stage would have completed the process.<\/p>\n<p>However, with the heightened concern for spam in the intervening years, Feedburner had decided to use CAPTCHAs at this step to prevent automated bots from creating spam mailing lists.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf-fi.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-1907 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf-fi.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"280\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf-fi.jpg 630w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf-fi-200x88.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Since Feedburner was acquired by Google by this time, I was bracing myself to see Google&#8217;s reCAPTCHAs at this juncture.<\/p>\n<p>I say &#8220;bracing&#8221; because, as I&#8217;d highlighted in\u00a0<a style=\"color: #2200c1;\" title=\"Permanent Link to If You Must Use A Long Form, At Least Pre-Fill As Much Of It As You Can\" href=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/25\/if-you-must-use-a-long-form-at-least-pre-fill-as-much-of-it-as-you-can\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"bookmark noopener\">If You Must Use A Long Form, At Least Pre-Fill As Much Of It As You Can<\/a>, reCAPTCHAs are becoming more and more difficult to crack. Of late, I barely succeed 50% of the time in cracking them on the first attempt. If you think I&#8217;m exaggerating, try your hand at deciphering some of these recent gems:<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1908\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1908\" style=\"width: 389px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf06.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1908\" src=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf06.jpg\" alt=\"gf06\" width=\"399\" height=\"80\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf06.jpg 952w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf06-200x40.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 399px) 100vw, 399px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1908\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Google reCAPTCHAs: Crack me if you can<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Luckily for me, Feedburner continued to use its earlier CAPTCHAs. As you can see from the below sample, they&#8217;re much easier to crack.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1905\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1905\" style=\"width: 391px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf01.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1905\" src=\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf01.jpg\" alt=\"gf01\" width=\"401\" height=\"178\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf01.jpg 630w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/gf01-200x88.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 401px) 100vw, 401px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1905\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Feedburner&#8217;s CAPTCHAs are a piece of cake<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Referencing its acquisition by Google, Feedburner says on its website:<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Hello, our name is still FeedBurner. Welcome! It took us a while but we moved the whole neighborhood, down to every last tree, beagle, and mailbox, to Google. We hope you like it.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Well, I don&#8217;t know about the tree, beagle and the mailbox but I definitely liked it that Feedburner&#8217;s CAPTCHAs have moved to Google.<\/p>\n<p>Otherwise, I&#8217;d still be pulling my hair trying to crack Google&#8217;s reCAPTCHAs and wouldn&#8217;t have had the time or energy to write this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When we separated our company blog from my personal blog Talk of Many Things, I had to migrate our business email subscribers from the latter to the former. Since I couldn&#8217;t find a way to automate this, I resigned myself to doing it manually. Because I&#8217;d chosen Feedburner to manage the feed and subscriptions of &#8230; <a title=\"Thank God Google Acquired FeedBurner Along With Its CAPTCHA\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/14\/thank-god-google-acquired-feedburner-along-with-its-captcha\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Thank God Google Acquired FeedBurner Along With Its CAPTCHA\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,4,13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b2-product-v-services","category-digital-marketing","category-product","category-mandatory-category"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8582,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions\/8582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}