Next, I'd prefer if you did a rant on Fanboys and Fangirls in a fandom. Some are crazier than others....
Bots typically have Optical Character Recognition (OCR). If it was as simple to read as this text, the bot could easily pick up the required word, and that's why you need the grids and the PMC style captchas and all that. I don't like them either, but they are needed. Server sites would be worthless without CAPTCHAs.
But those super hard captcha's are REALLY not needed. It seems that PMC has the hardest ones. If I had a nickel for every time I messed up on Planet Minecraft...
An interesting fact cddm95ace and I were told in our engineering class is that many captchas are used to transcribe physical written texts into digital text. By crowd-sourcing the identification of hand written or printed words, books not currently digitally transcribed are able to quickly and efficiently be "translated" into digital text. These words are generally the first of the two words in captchas and are usually the easiest to identify. For example, there's the first word, which appears in legible text, then the second, which is often wildly italicized with the letters mashed together in an infuriating mass. One day while voting on EMC, cddm95ace and I decided to test the "translation" theory by misspelling the first word, or the one not yet digitally transcribed. The computer didn't catch the mistake and the vote went through. While many newer captchas are simply meant to deter bots, some do serve a purpose. Now, if somebody were to post such information on reddit, hundreds of books could be mis-interpreted by computers.
I agree, PMC's CAPATCHA's are by far the worst! I always get them wrong because I miss count or don't see something. I generally think PMC is just a really bad site, the software they use is awful. I often question myself is to why they are so popular?
Next Rant Mondays next week! (not tomorrow)! Make sure you tune in July for the new rant mondays for July! I won't be on at all this entire week due to camp. Bye!