turbowebguy blog

Posts Tagged ‘bots’

Are you a bot? I know I’m not.

PROVE IT = CAPTCHA

When I’m doing a website and tell people I’ll add a Captcha feature to their site, they don’t know what I mean, I usually end up saying, “You know, that thing on a web site form where they have a color blind test looking word and you have to type what it is, it’s so that computer bots can’t send you fake messages, spam, et cetera.”

Then they’re like, so what is that? Why is it called that?

It’s sort of an abbreviation and an acronym for:

C ompletely
A utomated
P ublic
T uring test to tell
C omputers and
H umans
A part

You: Wow. I’m glad they made it easy. CAPTHA usually annoys me personally but when I first put up my turbowebguy.com, I had comments on the bottom of each page and got tons of SPAM! Reluctantely, I disabled the postings on my main site, just too much to go through, you can block IP addresses so that people can’t access your site anymore but if they used a proxy, which creates an alternative IP address, they’ll slip through again, and again. So that’s what CAPTCHA is and does, there are some easier methods I’ve seen in development but it’s sad it’s something we have to combat all the time. That’s one of the benefactors of the internet being unregulated, difficult to stop SPAM and bots. Cheers.