Of course, captcha’s are common and a base level of security for weeding out bots during a sign-up process. That Skype has one if hardly a surprise. What is surprising is just how annoying this captcha is. Again, annoying captcha’s are par for the course, but Microsoft is really taking it to the extreme. It seems new users coming to Skype must complete the captcha puzzle 10 times before being allowed to progress. This is a dangerous game Microsoft is playing because there is no doubt that many people will just not bother and ditch Skype before they even get started. The issue came to my attention from BleepingComputer, which carried out tests to confirm the annoying captcha is real. Naturally I wanted to see for myself, so off to Skype I went with a secondary email to try and sign up.
Account Dependent
Using a Gmail account, I was greeted by the puzzle even after I verified my email address. However, I was able to then sign in after a classic image captcha. My understanding is the situation with needing to solve multiple puzzles comes when you attempt to set up a new Microsoft Account alongside a new Skype account. Not only is it frustrating to need to solve a puzzle 10 times, users report the puzzle is a head scratcher and hard to solve. 10 times just seems like overkill. Tip of the day: With a single registry tweak, it’s possible to add a ‘Take Ownership’ button to the right-click context menu that performs all of the necessary actions for you. You’ll gain full access to all possible actions, including deletion, renaming, and more. All files and subfolders will also be under your name. The Take Ownership context menu will set the currently active user as the owner of the files, though they must also be an administrator. They can then enter the folder or modify the file as they usually would.