I get a small amount of comment spam, but I haven’t bothered with wiring up a CAPTCHA, because the spam hasn’t reached PITA proportions, and…I’m kinda lazy. But reCAPTCHA gives me a further impetus, because not only does it protect me from comment spam, but it does it by helping with the digitization of books! It works by using words not read cleanly by the OCR software as the base of CAPTCHA images…clever! So even if a bot grabs my reCAPTCHA and convinces someone trying to get access to porn somewhere else to decode it for them (a way around CAPTCHAs)…even then I’m still getting OCR work done for (presently) the Internet Archive.

Very cool! And they have a python library, so I may work on a plugin for Django (if someone hasn’t already). The site is quite informative…they discuss how the process works, how they can use a word they haven’t yet decoded as a CAPTCHA, etc. Good stuff! Check it out.