Most websites use some version of Captcha, as a kind of spam preventative measure. It makes sense, as software robots at the moment don’t have much in the way of artificial reading intelligence. The basic idea is that some sort of vaguely obscure selection of letters and numbers (sometimes words) are shown to a user in a form, who has to decipher it in order to send some information or signup for an account. The idea is that a spam robot is then prevented from posting comments (or what I would term spam generated content) to some page on the web.

I’m glad that certain websites, so far the only one I know of is Visual Complexity, are being different by asking us to apply a different kind of analytical skill - in VC’s case: by asking us to count when leaving a comment.

I’ll be looking out in future for further little morphisms of popularly used web technology.

posted by rowanp at 12:51 pm & filed under web, technology |