Recently one of Jabloggy’s regulars submitted a question about the “weird words” you’re sometimes required to type to submit a form on any given website. Not one to pass up the opportunity, I decided to serve up some good ol’ fashioned Scooby Doo and the gang for this one. (RUH-ROH!)
Those “weird words” are actually called Captcha (pronounced “CAP CHA”). The reason they are becoming increasingly popular on websites is for security and spam reasons. The Captcha words that you are asked to type are actually displayed on your screen as an image, not as actual text, on the page. Spambots (robot computers that only live to serve up spam and junk on the Internet) can’t read these images (they can only read text), but humans can. Captchas allow only real human users to interact with portions of websites so that the website owners can filter out the spam, junk comments, and fake user registrations. In fact, Captcha is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (and I just learned that on Wikipedia myself!).
So in the end, if it weren’t for those meddling spambots (and the meddling kids who are behind them), we wouldn’t have to go through all this “human vs. robot” validation. (ROOBY-DOO!)
For a more in-depth explanation on Captcha, check out the definition for CAPTCHA on Wikipedia.
Still confused about this topic? Leave your question in the comments below and let us know!
