Snared by Blogger captchas

I have a big problem with Blogger, the Google-owned service I use to post and host my blog. Every time I want to create a post, I have to enter "captchas", a string of scrambled letters that are meant to prevent automated programs from posting spam on the Internet. Because only humans can read captchas, they are seen as an effective way to control spam.

And I have to admit, some captchas are good captchas. You've probably encoutered them before when attempting to post a comment on an Internet forum or blog. The comment captchas make sense, because it is very easy for "spam bots" to automatically enter dozens of spam comments on a single blog post, potentially ruining the comment thread for other readers and making clean-up a nightmare for the owner of the blog.

But I have to ask the logic of forcing bloggers to deal with the captchas to post. Once I can understand. But hundreds of times? It should be obvious that a real human is running this blog, not only because I am entering the captchas every time, but because I've supplied a legitimate password, and because Harvard Extended is a legitimate blog. It would take some Google staffer two seconds to visually scan this page to see that it's real, and all the posts before it are real. It's very frustrating to deal with captchas every time I post to Harvard Extended, as they are sometimes hard to read and I fail on the first try, forcing me to read and enter a new string.

When I complained to Blogger last week, I was promised an answer but to date no one has gotten back to me. I guess I shouldn't be surprised -- it's a free service, I was sent a form email when I complained, and it's a question they probably don't want to answer.

Update: Sure enough, when I tried to post this the first time, the captcha I entered didn't match (or so they say -- maybe they didn't like my post?). So now it's a new captcha: safso. Let's hope it works.