Should I Use CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA or the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart is widely advertised but one wonders if it is really useful or not. But, before we discuss its practical utility, let us see what CAPTCHA is all about. It is a test, which helps the computer to distinguish between machines and human beings. It creates and grades tests that automatically accept all humans and reject all machines.

It works on the assumption that humans can read distorted machines but machines usually cannot do so. You can know more about CAPTCHA and smart CAPTCHA at http://www.protectwebform.com/ and http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha.

CAPTCHAs are really useful. They help preventing programs known as bots. Bots are programs that pretend to be humans and abuse the services of the internet. Bots usually have the intention to sell or make you sign up for thousands of free mail services. The bots spam your inbox daily. They penetrate common chat rooms with the intention of accumulating personal information and publishing links to various sites for promotional benefits.

In addition these bots can put a worm on your system, getting your passwords, and other personal information and taking it back to the Internet for others to use commercially without you even knowing how they got it.

You can use a CAPTCHAS or a CAPTCHA plug-in (http://www.protectwebform.com/plugin_wordpress) to stop these bots from taking over your system. Many sites of all sizes have installed these. Once the CAPTCHA is running as bots try to get into your system, they will be asked to type out a distorted image shown on the screen. Since computers can rarely translate these messy images into letters as humans can, it can stop the bot. you may have seen a CAPTCHA when logging onto your mail service, into a chatroom, or onto your bank website.

Spammers send unsolicited messages in bulk to you inbox. These messages are not desirable at all. The most common kind of spam is email spam. However there can be other spam too in the form of usenet newsgroup spam, log spam, search engine spam, instamessaging spam and similar others.

Some advertisers think spam is a good way to go to get their message out to the masses. It doesn't really cost them anything other than finding lists of e-mail addresses to send to, so they send mass amounts of mailings, and there is nothing you can do about to stop it, because laws do not allow holding a sender responsible for the number of mailings they send on the internet.

Usenet spam is a message that can be sent to twenty or more Usenet newsgroups. This kind of spam floods the newsgroups with unnecessary advertisement and posts. It also challenges your ability to accept and manage the topics on the system.

The other kind of spam, which is the email spam usually targets individuals with direct messages. The list of ids that are targeted to spam can be created by scanning postings from Usenet or pilfering with the Internet mailing list. This kind of spamming does incur a little more money.

Article Source: http://publisherscloninghouse.com

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