Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Help me out...

I love all of you out there in the blogging world, but...can someone please tell me what the point of the WORD VERIFICATION is on so many blogs! Wow, they make my life difficult. I can't read or something and fail them every time! I usually pass after about three or so attempts...so can someone tell my all the great qualities of the word verification so I won't die when I see another one of these:

Please type these letters:

llojosheohdj (Or something crazy like that)!

Love you all even though you keep me up all hours of the night!

9 comments:

Bonneville Mariner said...

Hey Joey,

Word verification is there to protect blogger comments sections from automated computer programs called spambots. People with way too much time on their hands write spambots to scour the Internet for forums and blogs and leave spam comments with links to naughty sites (leaving these links on a blog boosts their search engine ranking- they don't really even care if you click on them)

To prevent this, services like Blogger implements what's called a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

Since spambots and other computers cannot solve the test (yep, they have a tougher time reading those funny characters than we do), it's presumed that anybody entering a correct solution is human.

I'm not exactly sure how spambots determine the blogs they want to spam, but it can depend on what words you post on your blog. For instance, Tyler once wrote about his trip to the dentist and his experience under a certain laugh-inducing substance. He started getting all kinds of spam comments related to that and other substances)

I don't have word verification turned on on any of my blogs, and have never received spam comments on any of them. I think it's a better idea to turn comment moderation on in order to manually weed out unwanted comments. Word verification, though useful, usually deters me from commenting on a person's blog.

Hope that helps.

~Clint

The Redhead said...

WOW! Go Clint! He is so smart. What I would have said was its to prevent viruses or something. I just learned quite a bit myself. By the way, I have word verification because I kept getting those weird virus comments that said click here.

Terry said...

WOW!! I learned a lot to. I wish people would just leave good things alone! Love Ya!!!

{jane} said...

Wow, Touche' to Clint....

jenn said...

Holy Moly! Good thing there are people in the world like Clint to protect the rest of the people in the world like me.

But, I agree with you Joey. Those word verifications are SUPER annoying and would it really hurt anyone if they were easier to read?

Lyndee said...

I think that if you make your comments so that the blog owner has to approve them before you post them then away with the word verification! :)

Sara said...

Okay, kudos to Clint for clearing that all up for all of us! Doesn't make it any less ANNOYING though, does it Joe? I HATE it, too!

alli may said...

I was thinking that I was "retarded" (I know that is so politically incorrect) because I get them wrong all of the time.

Unknown said...

I say AMEN Joey.
No spambots visit my site, of which I'm glad, and I get all annoyed w/ typing verifications!