I do have one question actually. If google is banned, what do they use in China? I assume it's not duckduckgo. :)

Also, why are you not using a VNP?

I guess most Chinese use Baidu. For every service that is blocked in China you usually have a homegrown service to fill the gap.

Because, frankly, I don't miss most of the blocked content. Blocking Twatter and farcebook is IMHO doing a service to humanity. And google can kiss my ass ever since they hijacked my old youtube account and said "Haha, if you want to access your account again, you'll have to get a google+ account!" Yahoo works here and while it's not quite as accurate as google, it gets the job done. Youtube is also blocked, which kinda sucks, but I'm already used to 90% of youtube content getting blocked in oh-so-progressive Germany.

I see. 3rd search engine in the world, apparently. Well, thank you for yet another piece of generic knowledge I'll probably never find an use for. I'll add it to my collection. :)

Hope Humble realizes they're missing out. It's weird they're not doing anything about it in a time when western pubs and platforms are starting to realize how huge the Chinese market is. Even Gog has a Chinese forum now.
In the meantime, if you don't want to resort to VPN, it looks like letting someone else in your HB account is really the only thing you can do. :\

I hope you replied with something along the lines of:
"Hi,
you appear to have misunderstood the nature of my issue. I am not giving feedback, I am seeking help with a technical issue preventing me from accessing my purchases. I explained the issue and the causes behind it, I now expect technical support to help solve the issue.

Regards,
fronzelneekburm"

You might also consider passing along this old article from 2005 at the W3C about CAPTCHA and its inaccessibility, false security, and inhuman treatment of people. With Section 508 being so very publicly refreshed in January 2018 for government agencies and websites, it seems disgraceful a website such as Humble that associates itself with charities also ignores best practices for humane treatment of its customers.

On the other hand Google doesn't surprise me. Other than its front page it has always had poor interface design in everything else beyond a single textbox. Google's products demonstrate no sense for basic human interaction.

What's really sad is that with our clients and the different software platforms we support, it's a two second fix.

On a user's page, include an true/ false option to use Captcha.

On the login page, wrap the display with either a skip display or a 'always return a positive' result.

…plus the time it takes for people to feel comfortable changing the company policy beforehand…

Quick to change, but not easy to convince to change.

3 Minutes sounds like a pat on the hand compared to the agony I went with last week.

I haven't been getting often lately, but when it strikes I may as well get ready for a mug of coffee. It is so damn annoying beyond my level of tolerance.

Well I'm beginning to have vision issues, my father was blind, and my clients now have an average age of 40-ish so it wasn't that hard to realize it was an issue.

The last few weeks, I've been trying to deal with twillo.com with their lovely gray and gray website. Unfortunately their developers are more interested in a nice fancy design instead of usability.

The GoG website has issues as well with nothing but silence when I've tried to talk to them about it.

I think I mentioned previously that the best way to test a website is to get someone's grandmother to try it out. Developers look at things from their own point of view.

Having said all that, there are much easier ways to detect bots that work just as well.

Yep, sure enough.

Though, I would say it's likely none of that sounds comforting to "developers" because none of it addresses their own concerns. Obviously, things wouldn't be the way they are now if the interests were the same. Considering the developers are doing the work to get what they want, I would say it makes sense for other people to do their own work.

The recommendations that I've linked to in an earlier post in this thread are also self aware that they won't work for everyone. Even the same person will have different needs for different moments. Trying to make something work for most people still leaves out people. There is no including everyone, especially when even the same individual will need something different at different moments.

I think it's more sensible to focus on personally customizing the view rather than insisting (nor encouraging) developers to "do it right for everyone all the time". A person needs to do that themselves in the moment that matters.

With the default web browsers that come with an operating system, CSS can easily be used to adjust colors and text size and font families within a personal stylesheet that does not depend on developers of websites. Often there are brightness controls on the keyboard, and sound controls, and so forth, all for that very same reason.

A bit more on topic, yep, there are other ways rather than CAPTCHA. Though, I think they oughta figure out new interfaces where automation doesn't matter and is okay rather than detect automation. I think automation is important for making a computer easier to use by a person, so impeding automation will always mean impeding people.

That's what I've tried to do here at GoG.

I get garbage.

I can live with the default layout as it's not as bad as some websites.

The GOG website does seem to me a bit tidier than some others, especially as it's without advertisements. It also seems to judiciously use images rather than as building blocks for the page. Though the HTML for it is horrendous to trudge through, so now I just focus on basic properties for specific elements rather than affect the layout much. That's been much easier.

My default stylesheet for any website I view worked out pretty well for it, which is very basic with only a few color and font adjustments. Less = easier to maintain. Using my default stylesheet does sometimes create illegible parts that I typically ignore for a while until I visit a website more often. For the GOG website, I eventually copied my defaults into a new stylesheet and added more adjustments, and now its stylesheet is quite a bit more. The more I visit a website the more likely I'll create a custom stylesheet for it and fiddle with the CSS, but usually the extra is just for aesthetics or fun. Unfortunately, I sometimes don't know what people are complaining about when they refer to the actual view of the GOG website until I switch off my personal stylesheet.

My default stylesheet desaturates all images and fades them. Upon hover they brighten a little bit and become a little bit less faded. That gets me the text with minimal distraction from advertisements or gratuitous designs. I used to have some CSS for removing some known sources of advertisements, like removing an <iframe> classed as "googleads", but I've completely ditched that approach because there were too many over the decades. Severely fading them with transparency works well enough for me now. That and all the websites I rely upon nowadays don't use any advertisements, and I rarely visit new websites.

Lately I've simply closed the window on any website that requires a CAPTCHA, the remaining search results have usually had alternatives. I've forgotten whether GOG has one, other than people here have been saying it does. I only ever use my own computer for anything that requires logging in, so I lock my computer account rather than logging out from every website. That has helped me keep everything simple and usually pleasant; that and not maintaining so many accounts anymore.

Congratuations, you won! Feel free to change your chat settings, so I can send you your key.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

AWESOME!! THANK YOU!!!!!!!

I was going to. I really intended to copypaste your text, but laziness and the creeping feeling that I'm not going to get anywhere kept me from doing it.

But then, something beautiful happened. Something marvellous. Something completely unexpected.

They fixed it!

Yeah, I could hardly believe it myself. They actually fixed it. If you're trying to log into Humble from China, it now uses one of those cool, game-y verifaction systems: They show you a picture of a ball with an animal on it and you have to flip the ball until the animal stands on the ground. Infinitely preferable to the unresponsive "select all pictures with cars/street signs/storefronts on it" that google tortures potential humans with. Very cool stuff! And I can access my library again! Yaaay!