It is certainly a pain-in-the-ass, but obviously, it is put in place to assure that responses are from humans, and not bots. What annoys the heck out of me, are the “captchas” that consist of scripted letters, in varying fonts, that are always not discernible. What is more annoying is that with some poorly designed systems, if you enter the wrong response code, it makes you fill out the entire form again, rather than just the response code. That is particularly aggravating ! My solution is always to stick to numbers, and stick to one font. Any bot that screen scrapes, will parse the HTML text anyway, and font will be absolutely no deterrent at all – except to the real-time user, who has to decipher that mess !