reCaptcha - Real text verification

2007-10-10

I've just installed this handy little widget on my personal blog. For those (anyone left besides me?) who hadn't heard of it, reCaptcha is a word verification tool reputedly to guard against comment spam. I've only just installed it so its success is yet to be proven - however it does have a spin-off benefit. Text strings are taken from publications being scanned (currently) for the Internet Archive, this is what the reCaptcha guys have to say about it:

"reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly."

I believe comment spam is still coming in through the back door - but I have Akismet to help with that (and thanks to those guys). Meanwhile, here's a tool that is not only keeping my front door clean, it's making a literary difference as well. Hurrah to that.