Why the word verification while signing up accounts or messaging?

@sahithi-oJZaYj • Oct 24, 2024

Oct 24, 2024

1.3K

We have seen that some word verifications will appears while signing up in to accounts or while messaging. The text code appears will be very simple and easy to understand. Then Why these? Whats the need of these?
Is they, only to know the user whether a man or machine? Or anything more with that?

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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Jun 29, 2010

It is primarily used to stop machines from signing up and flooding the systems. Its called reCAPTCHA 😀
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Sahithi Pallavi

@sahithi-oJZaYj • Jun 29, 2010

Thanks Biggie, Just for clarification I posted this. 😀
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optimystix

@optimystix-4yMPKC • Jun 29, 2010

sahithi pallavi
We have seen that some word verifications will appears while signing up in to accounts or while messaging. The text code appears will be very simple and easy to understand. Then Why these? Whats the need of these?
Is they, only to know the user whether a man or machine? Or anything more with that?
AS biggie said, it is for verifying that the account is being made by a human being and not by an automated system. Hackers use automated programs called bots which can be programmed to create random accounts for imaginary users. This can cause severe damage to the server's database. One big kind of such a problem is spam on forums and blogs. Thus to prevent this they put up the word verification thing that you asked above.

One thing to notice is that the automated software used by the hackers work by recognizing texts that appear for verification. Thus, the captcha that we get these days are image based and not text based. The words are planted onto an image and that is being shown to us. This makes it almost impossible for most bots to recognize the characters properly. And for visually impaired (or sheer lazybones). they have option for audio captcha too, which reads out the letters and one is just supposed to type them back.
more can be read on wiki of course - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Captcha</a>

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Kaustubh Katdare

@thebigk • Jun 29, 2010

That's neat explanation, Opti! Let me update - CAPTCHA was compromised by spammers and machines were able to recognize the simpler texts presented by CAPTCHA. Then the next version of it was introduced and it was called reCAPTCHA (- what we have on CE and most other modern websites have it too). reCAPTCHA is difficult to break and it is very useful in preventing the spam and bot registrations.
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Sahithi Pallavi

@sahithi-oJZaYj • Jun 30, 2010

Wow! Thats the neat and clear explanation opty and Biggie.
Do doubts about it! 😀
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