OK, here's the thing with this image thing....you don't want people to design robots or programs or spiders or cockroaches or whatever to spam blogs and websites. I understand that. In fact, I am all for it. It's annoying to have spambots come in and post one liners like....
Can't get it up? Try this website. Top quality Viagra for low pricing. Value discount if bought inbulk.
Or the most common ones would be....
Want a completely paid-for holiday with your family and coming home to a villa beside the sea before taking a spin in your luxury car. Then you have to read this! It's amazing! Within three weeks, you will get $32,000 in your account. Within a month, whether you like it or not, we'll bank in $65,498 into your bank account. Within six months, you're a f*%#@* royalty.
I don't like that....and I assuming you don't like that either, right? If you have a popular blog, you get even worse stuff like hate mails, awful comments or people who are just jealous or experiencing severe PMS symptoms.
Hence, word image verification came into play. It's a good thing...
But these days, I think it's gotten so bad that some of these blog companies are GOING OVERBOARD with this image reading this, don't you think?
OK, for example. For www.linkmarket.net, I like it that their verification system is very simple. It's just like this.
Can see, right? Simple....7 and a 5 and an M. I think in this case, even the most sophisticated spambot cannot 'read' or 'see' the image. Logical.
But for some reason, the simple image verification is not enough wor, so they have voice or audio verification. Fine. Option for those who are blind or have sight problems.
Then they up the ante summore (some more) by putting in more words.
I forgot where I downloaded the above image from....maybe when commenting on a wordpress blog or something.
For dunno whatever reason, it seems that spambots can now READ the image. The '75M' thing is no longer enough. Now, you have additional words in there and some are capital and then some are lower case. Maybe it's designed so that dyslexic people cannot comment on blogs because they can't read the blog post properly in the first place. Geesshhh....I don't know why.
Then up the ante went again....and this time, it borders on being ridiculous liao.
I think this latest one from Yahoo! Buzz borders on insane lor...don't you think? I wonder what the intention is/was. To prevent drunk people from commenting in blogs or logging into their account? Honestly, if you're drinking or high on drugs, you'll probably type T V B T 7 p
This is a mild one...there were some that took me four to five tries just to get it correct, ok?
Siow wan (crazy), these people. Some cross out words lah, jumble lah, make invisible lah....I mean, isn't a simple image verification thing quite enough which serves the purpose....spambots cannot (as of this moment) read images?
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BTW come visit me at the link on my name lah :) I'm posting more often there now.