If you've ever tried to sign up to a website or comment on a blog and have been asked to enter some weird words that have all been out of order, you know how frustrating it can sometimes be to say a lowercase L from a number 1 or an O uppercase of a number 0. what are those crazy letters and why do we have to write them on the website to move on?
Those crazy codes are called CAPTCHAs, and they are a human response test. The word is actually an acronym for: "Fully automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart."
The reasoning behind why websites implement CAPTCHA codes in their registration processes is due to spam. Those crazy letters are a way to check if the person registering or trying to comment is a real living human being compared to a computer program that tries to spam the site. Yes, it is the same reason that most of us have some kind of spam blocker in our email.
Spam is the current equivalent of junk mail. But, if the spammers were in charge, the junk mail would not be in your mailbox.
And while it's frustrating to be continually asked to enter tangled letters in an image, it's worth it in the long run. Anyone who has ever created their own website or blog will get a taste of what spam is like up close and personal only weeks after going online - even if that website or blog has almost no traffic.
Spammers find quick little websites and blogs and target them because they often don't have much security to protect them.
If a site or blog owner didn't use some kind of CAPTCHA protection against it, they would be getting dozens of spam or comment loggers a day. And that's only for small websites and personal blog that are not very popular. I can only imagine what popular blogs must see.
