Elena ``of Valhalla''

Blocked by indiegogo because of blocked javascript?

Elena ``of Valhalla'' at

I usually browse the web with javascript blocked, for obvious security reasons and slightly less obvious free software reasons, adding sites to a temporary whitelist when absolutely needed.

I know that this hurts the revenue model of many websites, in some cases I'm sorry, in other cases I pay a subscription so that I don't have to be sorry, and in other cases I just don't care, depending on the service they provide.

One thing that I hate are websites that require javascript even to show their basic contents: I understand why some of them are doing it, but less so when they aren't getting money from ads, but from actually providing a paid service, such as indiegogo.

This morning I was browsing a campaign on that crowdfunding site, grudgingly allowed javascript from their domain to be able to see the campaign description and suddenly found this:

Image/photo

So ok, they want me to confirm I'm a human, ok, I'm fine with that, but asking for personal identification? just to be able to browse your site securely? No thanks. The support page linked in that says that this company also support just asking to fill a captcha, which is probably not as effective, but also much less intrusive.

I was browsing a campaign for an (apparently) open hardware encryption device, which is probably enough these days to get you somewhat under the radar (luckily, I am already, and I have a t-shirt to prove it :) ), so being asked to identify myself before I could even start considering whether the device was interesting enough to support (in a public-ish way) was expecially bad.

So, if you are working on something like that, maybe you could consider using a different crowdfunding website, one that respects more their users?

Jonathan Carter likes this.