I understand why blogs and forums might need to employ a CAPTCHA; there’s one on this very site for comments, added after spam-bots decided our massive readership would be really interested in wombat accessories or whatever other rubbish they’re peddling (blame/praise Melmoth for the word choice, though).

The Age of Conan forums employ a captcha whenever you want to search, which seems slightly over the top to start with (possibly to stop DoS attempts, I dunno). It suffers from one oh-so-minor flaw, though: it doesn’t show you a slightly deformed word to recognise, it vomits forth a Jackson Pollock tribute which allegedly contains six numbers and/or letters, though you can’t tell ‘cos they’re strangely distorted and rotated to start with, then a five year old has been let loose on them with a whole box of crayons (and not one of those little boxes with about six colours, oh no, we’re talking jumbo deluxe party selection). There were obviously plenty of people posting, maybe it was just me having trouble with the thing; I went to search on “captcha” to check, only I had to… oh yeah, pass the captcha…

Figuring it might only be required for non-registered users, I went to sign up, completed the form and… oh look, it’s a captcha (understandable, on registrations). After a mere thirty or so reloads, I finally found one where the resident child had missed most of the letters with the crayons and got through, and sure enough that avoids the need on every search. Except by that point I’d got bored and forgot what I was looking for in the first place, and went off to YouTube to find the source of this post title (6 minutes in), but at least I’ll be ready next time I need to search. So long as I can remember the login…