Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Monday: I'M NOT A SPAM BOT

I hate those things that make you copy letters and numbers that are hard to see to prove you're not a spam bot for the following reasons.

1) Half the time I can't tell what the letter/number is supposed to be. This is especially true of the ArsD website. I guess the other ones are at least legible.

2) They aren't real words. Real words I can type quickly. These random things I really have to think about and more often than not look at the keyboard to make sure I'm hitting the right key.

3) They involve numbers. Although I use numbers a lot, I'm not really a fan of typing them.

4) They take time.

Ok, so only the first one on one website is any real cause for frustration, but...sigh. If they could at least be words it would be nicer.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The thing you're referring to is called a captcha, and they're actually a pretty interesting area of study in computer science. It turns out, making one that is human readable while still preventing bots from solving them is incredibly difficult, especially since they usually give you several tries before locking you out (so a spam bot only needs to be right 1 out of every 3, 5, 10 times, etc. in order to get in)

Some places have tried having questions, but then the programmers can just change the bots to learn the types of questions and solve them.

Ironic, btw, that I have to solve one to be able to post this comment :-D

-Dusty

Amanda said...

What? I thought I turned that option off. Maybe I don't have a choice. Sigh. I'll check again. I guess I thought mine didn't have it turned on because I'm the blog owner or something dumb.

Amanda said...

There, I think I turned it off. Thought I had in the past, but who knows.