<p>The captcha is difficult to make it also difficult for a robot to solve.  You can blame pimply adolescent script kiddies hacking in basements, and other scum of the earth, for your difficulties.</p>

<p>ReCaptcha has two words.  One word requires an exact match, and the other word just requires a guess.  The match for the first word is based on what others have said the word is.  The guess word doesn't require you to be correct; it's there so that people typing in their guesses can serve as a "poor man's OCR" for the unknown image.</p>

<p>Some proxys make working with the captchas more difficult, because they screw up your post timing.  Also, there is a button on the captcha that you can press to get a new image, if the one you see is too difficult to decipher.</p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA</a></p>
