CAPTCHArt

CAPTCHA-related humor began with the widespread use of CAPTCHA (and more recently reCAPTCHA) on popular blogging and forum sites. The technology is intended to stop spam by asking the user to verify a pair of distorted words, thereby proving they are not a bot. In the case of reCAPTCHA these words are pulled somewhat randomly from an archive of textual documents requiring digitization, and that random pairing of words often produces strange and comical combinations. While simple reCAPTCHA screengrabs have appeared on sites such as lamebook, and "draw your CAPTCHA" threads have been around on the Something Awful forums for well over a year, the practice really took off when Moot implemented reCAPTCHA on the 4chan boards. Users took their extensive MS Paint skills and trollface comic generators and produced a wide variety of CAPTCHA related art and images, a sample of which we have included here.

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