Looking for ways to stop spams on your blog, wiki or forum. Using a reCAPTCHA plugin could help.
reCAPTCHA is a interesting idea that gives a new twist to the war against spam. This post will give a quick introduction to reCAPTCHA and you can learn more about it here.
CAPTCHAs are those colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of web forms. Their purpose is to separate humans from spam scripts.
Spammers usually use scripts to spam thousands of post in forum and blog comments. However most scripts are not as clever as human eyes in identifying the characters so they are blocked. Nice try spammers.
reCAPTCHA took this idea a step further. Instead of throwing away the text you had correctly entered, it is actually used to digitalize books. Books are scanned and broken down into words. As users enter the words in the CAPTCHA, the content of a book is slowly being typed out by users all over the world! (Curious about how this is possible? Read about the technical details on how it is done on reCAPTCHA website.)
reCAPTCHA is available as a PHP library and as plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, vBulletin, Joomla, Drupal.
If your blog, wiki for forum is suffering from spam, using reCAPTCHA could stop the spam. At the same time you are joining the worldwide effort to digitize books. What can be more simple!
If you need assistance to install reCAPTCHA, send us a note.
