This topic is pretty light, but it has annoyed me several times already today and it’s just past 10am.  You know when you sign up for something, or post a response on somebody’s blog, and you are presented with the little box of scrambled letters or numbers, and you have to correctly input them before you can continue? “Captcha” is one of the more popular ones. I absolutely hate those things!

Sure, I understand their purpose. They are supposed to stop bot-spammers. But at least in WordPress, you can set up “Akismet” to weed out the spam. Or you can moderate your blog and dump the spammers before they ever get posted. I have nothing against the companies that have developed this type of service, I just don’t want their service forced upon me.

Why do I hate these things so much? Because it seems like I rarely get them right the first time. Sometimes I get a capitalized letter mixed up with a lower one. Or a “0″ for the letter “O”. Sometimes they are so bunched together or presented in such bizarre colors and styles that they are simply illegible (see illustration above). If encouraging people to respond to your post or buying your product/service is so important, why are you making it so hard? Heck, even the mathematical ones aren’t quite as bad. At least I am usually able to add 3+1 and get the answer 4 correctly.

Am I the only person that finds these things annoying?