Stop Form Spam with reCAPTCHA
Tired of form spam? Doug Chestnut recommends reCAPTCHA—a free and very intriguing CAPTCHA service from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s one of those projects that seems so simple in hindsight that it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it before.
ReCAPTCHA serves up an accessible, secure means for ensuring that your comment forms, email forms, etc. are being submitted by an actual human being and not some clever spam bot. What’s more, by completing the CAPTCHA phrases, your users are actually helping Carnegie Mellon digitize its book collection (the phrases contain text that is unreadable by the OCR computer programs). Brilliant!
More Info from reCAPTCHA Site
- It’s Free! Yep, reCAPTCHA is free. The only reason we would charge is if you are a large corporation that uses a lot of our bandwidth, or if you require special services from us.
- It’s Useful. Why waste the effort of your users? By using reCAPTCHA instead of other CAPTCHA implementations, you are helping to digitize books.
- It’s Easy. reCAPTCHA is a Web service. As such, adopting it is as simple as adding 4 lines of code on your site. For many applications and programming languages such as Wordpress and PHP we also have easy-to-install plugins available. We generate and check the distorted images, so you don’t need to run costly image generation programs.
- It’s Accessible. Most other implementations of CAPTCHAs block visually impaired individuals, who cannot read images of distorted text. reCAPTCHA, on the other hand, has an audio test that allows blind people to freely navigate your site.
- It’s Secure. reCAPTCHA is run by the original creators of CAPTCHA and has the highest security standards. Many other implementations of CAPTCHAs can be easily broken.
