March 6, 2006 - The Importance of Annoying Captchas
First of all, you're probably asking, what the heck is is a captcha? A captcha is a "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart" and they are used wide spread on the Internet to do just that. They prevent robots and spam-bots from posting and gaining access to places where only humans should go.

If you have a form on your website, you have probably received spam through it. If you have discussion forums, you may have probably had spam messages posted on it. These are typically not done by people but rather computer programs developed to post spam around the Internet. The purpose of the captcha is to prevent robots and artificial intelligence by asking the user to input letters and symbols they see in an image. This way only people will get passed the captcha tests. This system worked fine until the programmers behind the spam-bots decided to use algorithms including OCR (optical character recognition) to read the text on these images and again be able to post spam anywhere they like. It has reached a point where the captchas that are currently used on the Internet are becoming impossible for even humans to read. Have you ever seen the one Microsoft uses? It usually takes a normal person, with perfect vision two or three entries to get it right.

Overall captcha's are both extremely annoying and extremely important. They are here to stay and will only become more and more wide spread as the Internet grows. In most circumstances, the harder the captcha is for you to read the harder it is for robots to read.

We have developed our own captcha, follow the link below to test it out:
• TBayIT's Captcha Program - Done in ASP (Active Server Pages)

• Free Captchas from captcha.net
• Learn more about decoding captchas
• Even more information about decoding captchas