Captcha is a stupid word.
Nonetheless, it is the word that was decided upon for the lovely little word boxes that you see everywhere. Captchas were developed to keep bots from doing a variety of things, most of which involve spam. The idea is that a computer program can't look at a muddled or twisted picture of letters and figure out what it means, meaning it can't do whatever it was supposed to.
For example, many Blogspot blogs require you to fill out a captcha before you can leave a post. This way, bots can't fill comment spaces with ads and spam.
Aside from the name, captchas are great, because they work. Where your average spambot can't make heads or tails of the image, the awesomely designed human brain handles it effortlessly.
Blogspot captchas always make me laugh, though. I chose to allow people to post on my blog without filling out a captcha, since unless it's a problem, I see no reason to make people bother with an additional step, but some of my friends have left the feature on (which is fine). The reason these captchas make me laugh is because instead of being a random assortment of letters and numbers (such as "xl5ji3"), they are an assortment of letters combined in phonetic ways, yet they don't actually spell out words.
If you don't get what I mean, allow me to illustrate. The captcha creator will often throw together letter combinations we see in words, such as "th", "str", "pl", etc. They also have a balanced number of letters and vowels, so that you end up with strings of letters that seem like they should be words, but aren't. Some ones that I just pulled up and looked at were "tsweat", "reptona", "bodccei", and "arglost".
I find it humorous because often times I sit and imagine what one of these pseudo-words might mean. To me, "bodccei" sounds like some sort of funky little tree, "arglost" is reminiscent of a ship or a fantastical weapon, and "reptona" may as well be the name of some female lizard warrior in a sci-fi TV show.
It may not make much sense, but at least it gives me a reason to smile as I fill out captchas every time I want to leave a comment.
2 comments:
My only complaint is when they are done poorly and you can't really tell what they say. You write in what you think is correct and you get sent back to square one.
You should play balderdash with me sometime. It's like captcha-guessing in game format.
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