GoneWacko’s Blog

reCAPTCHA

June 26, 2008 on 10:09 am | In Life |

Akismet is a lovely plugin that blocks a lot of comment spam.
For some reason, however, I’m lately getting increased amounts of comments that slip through; Either to the level where I at least have to review them myself, or to the level where they just appear on the website without any kind of moderation.

So today I decided that it was time to add another line of defence. Yes, I’ve added CAPTCHAs to the website.

I know that many people find these annoying. Especially the ones on such websites as RapidShare are thoroughly annoying and sometimes in fact impossible.
This one, however, is not so bad. For starters, the images are actually quite readable. This may make it easier for bots to automatically solve them as well, but in that case I still have Akismet to catch them in the act.

What really makes the CAPTCHAs I use better than most, however, is that I’ve gone for reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a captcha system (by the original inventor of CAPTCHAs) where the users actually help with digitizing books.

At school, I once attended a presentation by the inventor of CAPTCHAs, and he spoke of the various plans he had for ‘Human Computation’. One of these what is now known as reCAPTCHA, but another one of these was what is now known as the Google Image Labeler - a game which is addictive to play and provides google with labels to images for their image search at the same time.

So I hope these CAPTCHAs won’t annoy anyone. It’s not like there are that many people posting comments on here anyway. We’ll see how it goes.