What the hell is this ?

[minionofmidas]

The thing with the question mark?  Oh, I see stuff like that all the time.  Usually it's a sequence of letters and numbers in weird, melty fonts that are hard to read, and you're instructed to type them into a little dialogue box.  I think it's just to keep scripts from filling stuff out. 

Yes, that's what Ernest called a "captcha".

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Which is why they've been becoming vaguely difficult to decipher even for humans of late.