How many crosswalks? How many Cars? How many Fire Hydrants? Having to go through all these captchas is just a big pain. Who devised this crazy "I AM NOT A ROBOT" system in order to get answers to a simple question. I usually give up when i get to the question of how many Fire Hydrants i can see. Some of the pictures are so bad it is not possible to recognise anything.
Mex, some puzzles have a box to tick titled " I am not a robot" this takes you a a box divided into nine squares./In some of the squares there are illustrations of every day items e.g traffic lights, cars etc.You have to mark each square that has one or part of these items.This, apparently,proves you are not a robot and allows you to continue with the puzzle.
I hate the ones that say shop fronts and then give you things like a petrol station or office and you don't know whether to count it. And the traffic light or sidewalk ones often have 1% of the light/sidewalk going into another square and you don't know whether to count it. I don't mind doing it as security check for something important but when it's just to view something that no-one would hack into such as news page it's just a nuisance
The picture ones are no worse though than when they used to have numbers letters in weird font and I could never distinguish between 9, q, p an g for example
I have a few online gambling accounts and, for a time a few months back, Betfred were prompting me to click on the 'I am not a robot' icon. No catchpa, though. Didn't know robots were partial to the odd punt?
"If these things annoy everyone so much, why do they keep doing it? " - to stop the bots and brute force attacks. They are an attempt at someway of verifying the person logging in is human. Some are better than others. They are all annoying, I had one the other day where I had to complete a sum, that was less annoying. if anyone has any reliable ideas of how to distinguish a human from a bot, the tech world is all ears.