What is the Purpose of those...?

Question

verification things when you sign up for a website and they ask you to type these weird shaped scrambled letters?

if you don't get the letters right you cant log in....

what is that for?

Answer 1

That is so that it is guaranteed that a human being is the one submitting the request. There is a way to make computers submit request millions of times and hog all of the services available. But a computer can not make out those weird letters. A human can. So when you sign up and you cant type the letters in it kicks you out. You may be a computer trying to sign up 50 million times.

RJ

Answer 2

It's to prevent automated programs from signing people up. People use certain memberships for spam and get their accounts banned a lot...so they would use programs to fill out the information and sign up for hundreds of accounts.

Those letter identification things are a security measure, as it would take a very complex algorithm for a program to be able to detect which letters/numbers are in the boxes when they are all scrambled like that. But our brains as humans can easily detect them because of our familiarity with letters and numbers.

Answer 3

A lot of "spammers" use automated programs to do things like create Yahoo mail accounts, for example, so that they can use them to send out their junk E-mail. They use a program that can visit Yahoo's E-mail site, and fill in all of the blanks automatically to create a random E-mail account.

The purpose of requiring you to type in those weird letters is to defeat those automated programs. A "real person" (you) has to sit at the computer and read the weird letters, and type in the result. Those automated programs can't read those weird letters.

....yet. :-)

Answer 4

It's meant to prevent spammers from running automagic signup or login scripts when signing up for a website. It's meant for a real person to be able to verify the code real time and enter it.

Now a spammer can still do it by hand so it doesn't completely stop the determined. It just slows them down.

Answer 5

They are to prevent a computer from automatically logging onto the website and doing things like spamming.

This way a human is required to log-on, severely slowing any spam bots.

Answer 6

so they can tell that an actual person is entering the data instead of a program. its hard for a computer to analyze those letters and figure out what they are. companies don't want bots signing up for things over and over again.

Answer 7

To keep the Borg out.