When we went live with our new website recently, we also went live with our blog. For those of you who run a blog as well, I’m sure you’ve had the pleasure of dealing with spammers leaving comments filled with nonsense. To try and alleviate this annoyance, we’ve added a CAPTCHA to our comments section. For those who are unsure what a CAPTCHA is, you’ve probably seen them before; they are the boxes with distorted text at the bottom of registration forms that ensures a human is entering the information, and not a computer program. The CAPTCHA that we’ve installed, however, does more than just prevent automated-spammers from leaving their mark on our blog.

ReCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that uses the 150,000 hours spent each day solving CAPTCHAs around the world to help digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. This ingenious idea helps to archive human knowledge, and the elaborate process is explained in great detail at their website.