While CAPTCHAs are helpful, they don’t entirely prevent bots or spammers. Users will have to follow the instructions given by the CAPTCHA and input some sort of response to prove that they’re human. Sites generally present a user with several images, a line of text or numbers, or an audio track. While they can sometimes be annoying, CAPTCHAs are necessary to protect websites from exploitation by hackers and other malicious third parties Whether it’s having to pick out all the squares that have kittens, move a puzzle piece to the right spot, or type the scribbled letters shown, we’ve all jumped through our share of hoops. They are designed to be easy for humans to solve but difficult for computers, and they are still widely used today to prevent bots from spamming websites. CAPTCHA is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” Computer scientists came up with the simple tests in the 1990s.