If nothing else I am known as a man with umpteen pet peeves. One of them is CAPTCHA. (It’s an acronym–I won’t provide the full expansion here for fear of barfing on my keyboard out of its sheer inanity.) I guess it’s great that it reduces comment spam and mass bot purchasing on Ticketmaster, but, damn, it’s annoying.
I’m not sure if Blogger uses CAPTCHA, but its verification words are consistently amusing. Getting a smirk-worthy word is its one redeeming quality. (Unrelated: I don’t get why there’s a wheelchair icon next to the entry box.)
Henceforth, I will boycott any site that uses CAPTCHA. I do this for the same reason that I refuse to show my receipt to the friendly septuagenarians at my local Walmart upon exit. I don’t appreciate the assumption that I have nefarious intentions, e.g., spamming, theft, until I prove otherwise. It allows me to both protest and be lazy. Win-win!
Fighting comment spam was a huge pain in the ass until I setup reCAPTCHA.
By the way, I can get you some Vi4gr4, cheep.
WordPress has a great plugin that comes preinstalled and captures almost every spam comment so that I never see even them. Or maybe visitors to my site, genuine readers and spammers, are few enough in number that it doesn’t matter.