Impossible word verification

Word verification, the bane of my existence, even finds me on my own blog! How many times did I have to re-type my ridiculously long password and press "continue" to create Warp Ten last night? Seven. Taking into account the length of my password, the fact I had to type it in again to verify it, and the fact I had to do all that seven times...I had to type 224 characters instead of 32 (And that's just for my password, of course. Take into account all the image verifications I failed to type correctly and that's about 50 more!). All because of that stupid "safe-proof" built to protect websites from bots. And it's not just Blogger, of course...Facebook actually has you verify every email you send for the first few weeks of use! Here's a few from around the internet to give you an example...



WTF?! Blogger expects me to know what this is??



Whoever wrote this one must've been referring to whatever sadist created the hell that is "word verification".


OK, I really don't want to know.

All I'm saying is there are way better ways of checking if your loyal customer/member is a malevolent unit of artificial intelligence without treating them like a felon! Here's a few suggestions:

• Have them look at a picture of a number and then check the correct number out of a list of possibilities. I've seen this done and it works very well.
• Give them instructions to do something that a computer couldn't comprehend and do. Like, "Spell 'genius' backward in all uppercase".
• Ask a very easy question like, "Why did the chicken cross the road?"