Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem.

Twenty years ago the only certainties in life were death and taxes. Now, in  this new Internet age, we can add spam to the list. If you are active online you can be sure to attract the attention of every sort of robotically generated pitch, from Viagra (spelled Via@ra to get past spam filters) to the more targeted automated sales pitches based on key word searches of your blog contents.

To counter the flood many sites now require some sort of proof that “you’re not a robot” by requiring a human being to interpret some oddly constructed text which is supposedly not possible to do by machine.

Hence we get this:

Or this:

Neither of which are remotely readable by anyone – man or machine.  Sure you can request a new code, but sometimes you will go through 3 or 4 iterations before finding one that is even barely legible.

Personally I find these captchas irritating as hell and have found myself, on more than one occasion, simply deleting a comment I’ve made on a post rather than dealing with an unintelligible scramble of images that is supposed to mean something to me but not a computer (it actually makes you wonder who’s really in charge here). So in a do-unto-others kind of way, I have decided to remove this irritant from my blogs and hope that I can stay on top of the spam flood, because there just has to be a better solution than this.