WORD VERIFICATION. Something us Bloggers probably use a lot, right?Anyone else notice these random streams of colorful, squiggly letters seem to be getting longer?
Really! It's seems like they used to only be four or five letters long at a time. Now, they are usually around eight letters long.
Not that it's a big deal. Don't get me wrong! It's just that noticing this progression of change made me wonder what the purpose of word verification was in the first place. I thought I kinda knew it had something to do with spam, but wasn't sure.
So I did some looking!
On May 1, 2006, Blogger announced the following:
One of our most effective tools for preventing spam and automated abuse of Blogger is our word verification image. We require it to be solved to create a blog or post to blogs our automated spam classifier catches, and offer it as an option for you to include on the comment form on your blog. Word verification (sometimes called a CAPTCHA™) is designed to be a simple puzzle that a human can solve easily but a computer cannot.
So, there you have it! Or, there I have it, anyway. You probably already knew . . .
But I never did come up with an explanation for why the letter combos are growing . . . Are they just running out of four letter combos? Can they really only use the same combo once? Does the ever-changing color of the letters have anything to do with the mix? So many questions!!!!
But I never did come up with an explanation for why the letter combos are growing . . . Are they just running out of four letter combos? Can they really only use the same combo once? Does the ever-changing color of the letters have anything to do with the mix? So many questions!!!!
???????????????????
1 comment:
I've had some spam on my comments so I started using the verification. I think it is so annoying so today I turned off the verification and will see if I can keep on top of the spam. I'll see how it goes.
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