Help - Captcha
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What is Captcha? Captcha is a system for attempting to confirm that the user of a web site is an actual person. Basically, by sending an image with some letters in it that would be extremely difficult for a program to figure out, but should be relatively easy for a human to determine, you can prove reasonably well that the user is not a robot. How do robots use this site? Robots, in this case, are less interesting than shiny metal beings that the name inspires fantasies about. They are often little more than hand crafted programs designed to skip through parts of a web page. In the case of this site, first they skip the page with the form on it. The page that real people use to fill out the details of their fun links. By skipping that page and sending information to the page that shows you your new shortened URL, they never see my ads. The problem is made all the worse, by the fact that while they cannot skip the page that actually makes the shortened URLs, they can prevent it from showing ads too. If the results of the page are captured or ignored, then Google never gets the chance to show ads. Why do I need to do this? Well, that's the real question isn't it? I don't mean to sound like a money grubbing so-and-so here, but this site is paid for by ads. If I can't get that money, I can't run the site, and this whole party is over. Frankly after all the work I've put into this site, that would be quite a shame. An example of how bad this has gotten, I recorded a day where over 2000 URLs were shortened, and Google reported that my site had shown 4 page views with ads. Needless to say, that's not going to pay anyone's bills. |
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