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New Spam Filter - reCAPTCHA

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, Technology

One of the biggest issues that pops up when you run a blog with any sort of readership over 1,000 unique visitors a day is comment spam. It’s a son of a bitch, and it can take a lot of time sorting through the stack because I don’t want to delete real comments that get caught in the filter. Yes, even yours Dos.

Well, now my problems should be solved because I’ve installed reCAPTCHA. It’s a spam filtering system where you (yes you, kind reader) have to type in a couple visually obscured words before you can submit a comment.

However, it’s not an ordinary spam filter, because when you type in those words you aren’t just preventing long hours of me sorting through spam logs. You’re also helping digitize old books.

The people at reCAPTCHA explain it better…

reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

Hope you enjoy helping me fight spam and making the world a better place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 and is filed under Blogging, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “New Spam Filter - reCAPTCHA”

confused Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Wonderful concept.
wj Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
And another demonstration of why computers aren’t close to replacing human beings yet.
mw Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
cool.
Joshua Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Sweet!

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NOTE TO COMMENTERS:

You must ALWAYS fill in the two word CAPTCHA below to submit a comment. And if this is your first time commenting on Donklephant, it will be held in a moderation queue for approval. Please don't resubmit the same comment a couple times. We'll get around to moderating it soon enough.

Also, sometimes even if you've commented before, it may still get placed in a moderation queue and/or sent to the spam folder. If it's just in moderation queue, it'll be published, but it may be deleted if it lands in the spam folder. My apologies if this happens but there are some keywords that push it into the spam folder.

One last note, we will not tolerate comments that disparage people based on age, sex, handicap, race, color, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry. We reserve the right to delete these comments and ban the people who make them from ever commenting here again.

Thanks for understanding and have a pleasurable commenting experience.