Red Series

Monday 12 November 2012

Happy Crappy Captcha Day: Fighting Evil...Words

Today Shelly and friends are hosting Happy Captcha Craptcha Day! For those who have no idea what Captcha is I have posted a definition below. In short Shelly, myself and all others participating on this day want to let you know the evils and disadvantages of having Captcha on your blog.



Definition (according to wikipedia) : A CAPTCHA (play /ˈkæp.ə/) is a type of challenge-response test used incomputing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a human being. The process usually involves a computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to grade. These tests are designed to be easy for a computer to generate but difficult for a computer to solve. If a correct solution is received, it can be presumed to have been entered by a human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires the user to type letters and/or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen. Such tests are commonly used to prevent unwanted internet bots from accessing websites.
The term "CAPTCHA" was coined in 2000 by Luis von AhnManuel Blum,Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (all of Carnegie Mellon University). It is anacronym based on the word "capture" and standing for "Completely AutomatedPublic Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". 



Sadly Captcha has become less a deterrent for spammers and more a deterrent for readers commenting. Worse I was actually one of the perperators 'til September of this year. Like many bloggers I assumed that because I didn't want it then it wouldn't be on my blog. During GUTGAA there was an explanation about how to turn off Captcha and since it suggested bloggers might not know they have it, I decided to check my setting. To my horror I realized I had it on my blog. After opting out I felt so much better and so bad for all my readers who had to trudge through it all those months. Please remove captcha from your blogs. While it might've once been a great help to bloggers now it's just a deterrent for new readers and followers.

I'll leave you all with a haiku.

Bye Bye Captcha

Oh happy day all,
Captcha has had it's great fall.
Now comment in peace.

Remember to visit other blogs celebrating here.

9 comments:

  1. The owner of the site can't see it, so many don't know it's on.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This post is brilliant on so many levels. Let me name just a few.

    1. James Van Der Beek
    2. The hebrew captcha. That one always makes me laugh.
    3. I thought I didn't have it either until I checked my settings after 6 months or so of torturing everyone who came to my blog.
    4. That haiku is genius!

    Thanks for playing. I love this post!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I HATE captcha! To make it worse, Blogger's got ridiculously hard to decipher a few months back with the separate # thing, etc. My limit is twice; I'll try to comment twice (basically one failed captcha), if I can't figure it out I move on.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Awesome little haiku. It says it all!

    ReplyDelete
  5. They've gotten so much harder to read. Even i give up sometimes.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I hate captchas! Especially sinec have the time I can't figure them out and that's REALLY frustrating when I want to leave a comment for someone. *sigh*
    DOWN WITH CAPTCHA!

    ReplyDelete

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