11 Comments

The Spam / Captcha Conundrum

September 15, 2008 by in Random with 11 Comments

Spam has reached an uncontrollable level. It floods my inbox, it fills my mailbox and litters my blog. Sure, I use spam fighting plugins to filter out most of the garbage but the onslaught makes comment moderations next to impossible.

What do do? A Captcha. I recently implemented “ReCaptcha” to help keep the spam away.

So why ReCaptcha? Well, I feel if a user must be inconvenienced might as well let it be for a good cause.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

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.

Sure a captcha keeps the bots at bay, but it also takes a toll on reader usability. I’m curious what you readers feel about captcha’s? Should I keep it? Should it be banished? Sound off!


  • David

    Keep it. It’s for a good cause, and really, it’s not that much of a hassle. To the extent it is a hassle, it might prevent certain individuals from quickly flapping their gums and incentivize them into putting a little bit of thought behind their words.

  • Nigel

    What I don’t get with the reCaptcha is how it works.

    The computer can not read it in the first place. How does it know what I type in is correct?

    LOL. Tried typing what it said, it said “Incorrect Captcha”

  • Nigel

    Some feedback: My comment posted correctly, however, I still received the error message.

  • jopari

    It knows what one of the words is already, so if you get that word correct it assumes that the other word is correct as well. It’s a little dicey, but apparently it works pretty well.

  • Carlos

    Keep it. Like stated above, it’s for a good cause.

  • Eleventeen

    Keep it. I don’t mind captchas in general as long as they’re not one of the infamous unreadable examples. recaptchas aren’t typically that bad.

  • http://fernyb.net fernyb

    Keep the CAPTCHA

  • chad
  • anotherdavid

    there are captchas and captchas, some are so complicated with almost overlapping characters that are completely unreadable. Yours is readable, and forms an actual word. Sites like Myspace have captchas that can be interpreted, instead of read.
    It is a damn shame that the spammers are ruining the internet. They are no better than terrorists, really, who can force the free world into taking measures that would otherwise not be necessary. A captcha to place a comment is nothing more than getting frisked at the airport. Both, unfortunately, have become necessities.

  • Roger

    @CHAD

    That’s hysterical! Thanks! Go kitten captcha!

    P. S.: I’m resubmitting this, I screwed up the ReCapthca the first time…never would have happened with kittens.

  • http://mavrev.com Matt

    Keep reCaptcha, it helps on spam while also doing something useful. Other captchas don’t really work well, are hard to read, and are annoying. I don’t find reCaptcha like that.

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