Whats with the CAPTCHA?
When you are adding or modifying a link, you are presented with an image showing 5 alphanumeric digits on top of a distorted background. This is called a CAPTCHA — “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. One use for CAPTCHAs is spam-prevention. Some spamming web-sites use web robots (a.k.a. “bots” or “spambots”) to identify pages that accept user data and then automatically and repeatedly send data to them without human intervention — in this case, these spambots submit spam links to the Link Database (for example, to sites that sell porn or Viagra). I, then, have to sift through and delete all of these spam submissions, which is time-consuming and annoying. Thus, the CAPTCHA. It is very hard for a computer to “read” skewed and distorted letters but typically not too dificult for humans. So when you correctly enter the code that you see in the image, the site can be pretty sure that you are a human, and it allows your link submission through. If th
