captcha

Maybe they figure if humans can't read them, neither can the bots? LOL

I agree they can be annoying. Sometimes I have to click reload a few times before there is one I can decipher. None of those screening things work 100%, but something is better than nothing for bot accounts.

 

I agree they are annoying but so is fake members who signup to forums to post spam links and malware, so there is a fine line to annoying to signups and annoying malware links in forum threads/posts.

We do actively try to lessen both and are quite successful at this for our members, as the admin team do review new member accounts and homepages and known email spam addresses

not really as that while not easy to know all answers to a question, if a common one it could be guessed by a computer, whereas a picture is harder to work out, majority of systems like banks etc use mothers maiden name, place of birth etc and not hard in reality to crack in time, hence they tend to use IBN plus a name, plus the keypad code or a random entry of your password phrase.

Sadly as cyber crime is becoming the new B&E security will on internet accounts and even email become more strict, especially for recovery of a PW.