I'm An Automated Robotic Spammer

A startling thing to 'fess up to, I will admit, and probably not what people were expecting to see at the top of the page when they arrived at 0ddness. But, it is a conclusion I have simply had to come to thanks to the incredible amount of evidence.

Now, most of you that frequent blogs will have come across the very bane of my existence, the dreaded "Word Verification" doohicky, used to prevent spamming automated posters, bots, robots, whatever. Type a comment, enter the random letters (SO not a word!), click Post Comment, job done. I don't know if it's something in my brain that misfires, or I have a momentary lapse into the realm of dyslexia, but I cannot, without fail, enter the letters first time around. Quite often, I fail the second attempt as well, and I really don't understand why.

This column of letters is from the blogs I've spent the last hour pottering around, series of letters that I look at, type out, fail, retype and so on. Each one of these I fail. I know the last one is W. D. M. W. D. T. K but then, that's because I just sat and typed it out carefully. Usually I look at them, note the first three letters, then the next two or three, and so on, click publish, get the error message.

On that list, the first item and the third are a complete nightmare for me to read - I don't know why though. I don't know if it's because of the angles of the letters, the font used or because they are generally distorted. I often confuse the Ds and the Bs, Gs, Ps and Qs, the Ms, Ns and Rs tend to merge into one block of arches "mnrnmrnmrnrmnr" and generally, I find that I am crap are entering these codes.

All the different word verifications I've come across are the same, but being an idiot, I don't have the patience to use the visually-impared alternative (which is an audio series of letters). The odd thing is, I can remember number plates (car license plates), and strings of numbers and letters, but word verification? Not a chance!

And to add insult to injury, I noticed I wasn't getting any mail on my new addy earlier, so in true paranoia, I sent myself an email.

Which ended up in my Spam/Junk folder.

So I guess I really am a spammer :(

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4 Responses to “I'm An Automated Robotic Spammer”

Nancy Jensen said...

It's gotta be the way they twist and turn. about 1/2 the time I am positive I was right and yet fail the test.... other times I look and look at it and wonder, what in the world??? I think I'm dyslexic... especially my left hand. The other day I used my debit card and entered my pin with my left hand. PIN number rejected. So I entered it with my right hand and ta-da! It worked.

But secretly, I always knew you were a spammer.

The Special Zipper said...

Dan the spammer ... that's all you do over at the special zipper.

Seriously though, I struggle .. some are definitely easier than others .. the angle of the letter on some run into the next letter making it hard to work out.

I hate word verification. I got spammed so I turned it on but I think I might turn it off again now that I know you can actually delete a comment which you couldn't do from memory with old blogger unless you deleted the whole post.

debbie said...

I have trouble too dan espcially at Tims site,, ok all places where I have to write the code in.. may be because I have not got my glasses on half the time,, but I do wonder with you dan wether the angel and the cloured blindness has anything to do with it too

g-man said...

I hate those things too. I usually just hit enter until I get an easy one.