ReCaptcha: Bloggers Block Spammers While Saving the World

ReCaptcha is a free spam blocking tool that can turn the average blogger into a superhero. Haven't you ever wanted to defeat the evil of internet spammers while helping to preserve the collected knowledge of mankind? It may sound like a tall order, but ReCaptcha helps bloggers do just that.

If a blogger is using LiveJournal or Blogger, those platforms already filter out spam. But for authors who want more control over their blogs, that independence usually comes with a price. Internet spammers take advantage of the interactive nature of a blog to reply to posts with unsolicited advertisement or links. They usually use computer programs, or "bots" to do this. Because most blogging platforms can't distinguish between human users or computer programs, some of the best writers on the net spend more time filtering junk off their sites than engaging in a dialog with their readers.

ReCaptcha is a revolutionary little program that helps distinguish between computers and humans by demanding that posters translate little bits of distorted text before their post will be accepted. The human eye is easily capable of distinguishing smudged letters or even handwriting, but computers are decidedly bad at it. And while that's still the case, ReCaptcha can keep them away from your site.

But no doubt, you've seen these kind of word challenges on the net before. So what's so special about ReCaptcha? Here's the part where helping to preserve the collective knowledge of mankind comes into play. When ReCaptcha challenges you to translate distorted text, it gives two words instead of just one.

One of the words, ReCaptcha already knows. When you translate it properly, it knows that you're a human and not a computer and lets you post to the blog accordingly. But the other word comes from one of the millions of old books that are being digitized for the Internet Archive-an online library for historians, researchers, and the public at large.

When the Internet Archive attempts to scan old books, the Optical Character Recognition reader that they use can't recognize all the words. They could hire someone to translate all the words that were missed, but that'd be both expensive, tedious, and take an unreasonably long time.

That's where ReCaptcha comes to the rescue. It's estimated that sixty million word challenges are answered online every day across the world. By pooling the resources of everyone who posts on blogs, reCaptcha can cut the workload of digitizing old texts significantly.

By comparing the answers of thousands of ReCaptcha challenges, previously indecipherable words become clear and older texts will be accurately digitized, all while fighting unwanted spam.

So who says you can't be a superhero while blogging from your mom's basement in pajamas?