Curse on those Captchas!

I like blog hopping. I don't stop with bloggers that I know or blogrolled. I like to go to one blog, select another blog from its blog roll, then repeat the process to hop to another blog without looping back to an already visited blog. This way, I go to completely new blogs. I've come across many interesting blogs this way. I've come across funny blogs, serious-with-a-cause blogs, plain but interesting blogs, dead pan humourous blogs, very diverse everyone of them.

Some posts make me wish I had written them. Some are so well written that I think of ceasing my blogging altogether and remaining just a reader. Standards so high! Some blogs I remember without blogrolling them (OK, OK, my browser remembers) and visit them frequently. One widely prevalent thing I found is a majority of them employ captchas.

Captchas or "word verification" as described in blogger are a real nuisance. I'd spy a real interesting post which would provoke a comment from me. But in there a captcha would be sitting patiently waiting for me. After commenting, I'd scroll down to hit the Submit only to find cursive and mangled letters asking me to identify them. Some letters among them are a real pain to identify. Some captcha styles make the letters lean on one another making it more difficult to make out what they are. Even if they don't schmooze, they look twisted nearly out of shape. Simply put, they take the joy out of commenting.

Except for the regular blog network, I don't comment on every blog. Infact I avoid commenting on popular blogs that have an insane number of comments even though the posts are too good to leave without a comment. Still a random blog with a post that stops me in my hop and skip through the blog world elicits a response. But the captcha hurdle has to be crossed before saving my thoughts on the post.

Ofcourse, I realize the reason for them reptilian letters being there. I too had the "spam rash" once. But the spammers now seem to be losing interest in hitting blog comments. They must have got a very low rate of response. I guess only a few cranks just for the joy of annoying others still churn out those despicable things. But the cure for them has almost become a bane now. Sometimes I'd hurriedly mistype in a captcha only to be served with another of its ilk. This time I'm chastened enough to patiently pore over it, make it out and repeat it like a kindergarten child writing out the alphabets!

Only good thing is a captcha is less of a pain than a password. Passwords!! Now they are an entirely different story and deserve a more blistering post!

Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University coined the term in 2000 to describe codes they created to help Internet giant Yahoo Inc. thwart a spam problem. "Turing" refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician famous for his codebreaking work during World War II and, later, as a pioneer in artificial intelligence.