CAPTCHA

I hate them too. On some sites they seem to accept them more easily, but sometimes I've had to refresh so many times that I've lost patience!

Huh?
Explain please glass.

Ditto!

Sometimes it isn't clear whether the letter is upper or lower case, as well!

ga they're those strings of letters and/or numbers you have to decipher and type in so the site knows you're a human being, for security purposes.

grannya its those scrambled letter that you have to decipher to enable you to access different sites or on forms etc, they are usually in different fonts and all squashed up together.

None of them ever spell anything you can decipher anyway or is it me who needs to go to specsavers.

They don't spell anything, glamma - it's just to see if you can recognise the letters.

I hate them. Sometimes you can't tell the difference between an 'o' or a zero or they blurred and you can't read anything because they are squshed up together!

Oh I've got it now. It's a neoligism that I shall be sure to incorporate into one of my 'computer-speak' classes.

And there's yet another new word to add to my vocabulary (if I remember it!). Thanks, ga!

I hate the way they squash the letters together so you have to guess and then they say you've got it wrong.

The ones that slowly move up and down are much easier to decipher, and - no - I haven't had too many - they really do move up and down

Bloody annoying things! I encountered a particulary bad one whilst trying to register with an employment agency.

I know that they are there for a reason, i.e. to stop random computer generated hits and web bots, but it meant after failing 3 times, I couldn't continue with my registration.

Can't really see the point. How does the security work?

This makes it all crystal clear goldengirl (or not!)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

It is an acronym based on the word "capture" and standing for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

I think the security works because only a human being could capture a captcha and type it in! so the computer or website 'knows' it's not a cyber phishing scam or a computer generated virus or a hacker. For most of them you can click on a button and get them as an audio, or otherwise I just refresh till I get an easy one. Agree they're a pain though.

yoga and I replied at just about the same time. . Now will have to find out what a 'Turing Test' is.

Let me know when you find out grannyknot - I never realised that it actually stood for something, thought it was just a play on the word "capture"

Aarrgh - just looked up Turing Test on Wikipedia - can't make head nor tail of what they're on about

Maybe it's something to do with Alan Turing who was responsible in some way for the enigma code breaking thingy! In WW2.