Proving I am Not An Autobot And The Problems Reading Captchas Tests
We all want our websites to be popular and have lots of web users visiting them. To assist the popularity of websites backlinks are a big help. One useful way of building backlinks is to sign up for various websites and blogs that give you a profile name. The user names are to be used when you are commenting on their site. Many will have the option of adding a URL for a website address to your profile details and this will be counted as a link back to your site by the search engines. Some people spend a lot of time finding and building these backlinks as they are unlikely to disappear and they can sometimes be on high pageranking websites.
The spammers and black hatters have noticed this too, of course. Before long they started spamming the heck out of websites that offered anyone the opportunity to gain a link. The result of all this computerized spamming was the development of the CAPTCHA system whereby you have to type in the word or phrase shown to demonstrate you are a real person wanting to sign up.
The spammers were not going to let this stop them and they have constantly developed better and better captcha readers to continue with their automated activities. This has now got us to a position where some of these captchas are very difficult to read by us humans. I frequently type in the wrong words because I cant quite figure out what the letters and numbers are supposed to be.
I can see a day coming when the only website visitors that will be able to read the jumble of letters presented will be autobots controlled by computer systems. The only users to be able to get these website profile backlinks will be the computer controlled autobots. I have no idea where will that leave us and what we will do then. It may be we will see clips of video and be asked questions about what happened but the captcha system will need to be very sophisticated so it can understand a natural language reply.
It is in the nature of computer programs and computer systems that they are developed and get better and better at what they do. We poor humans are stuck with the eyes and brains we are born with. We can only hope that there will be some new development that makes it easier to tell a human from an autobot. To be honest I think that is unlikely to happen. Whatever they come up with you can be sure computer programers will find a way to overcome it and us poor humans will be forever struggling to prove we are a real person.


