Zappos.com fends off robot spammers by offending humans

The term “captcha” is an acronym that stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” When you fill in fields on a website in order to leave a comment on a blog (like this one) or to share a link with friends, you will sometimes be asked to decipher a squiggly, distorted code before you can hit “send.”

It’s annoying — especially if you’re dyslexic — but captchas are supposed to help prevent robot spammers and viral programs from hijacking content or otherwise exploiting a website. Still, sometimes you can’t help but think, there’s gotta be a better way. Especially when the automated text-generators end up inadvertently spelling something funny or rude, which happens more than you’d think. It happened to me yesterday morning when I tried to send a link to a pair of shoes on Zappos.com to a friend. I took a picture of the screen. Check it after the jump: