John W. Martin

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CAPTCHA Integration

As if you don’t already get a bunch of annoying and unwanted emails from those desperate penny pitchers who can care less about your privacy, creating a website that enables people to contact you is nothing more or less than a spam magnet in the making. However, the commonly utilized tool called CAPTCHA will eliminate this problem for you.

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Aren’t you glad we have acronyms? The long name itself pretty much gives you the definition but to me more precise, it is usually a small picture of a series of letters and numbers (sometimes actual words) that computers can not normally read but humans can. By simply looking at the image and typing the word that you see into the space provided, you are telling the computer that you are a human and not a spam bot.

Some other forms of CAPTCHA may include test questions or even a series of images where you have to manually select the appropriate ones before continuing to submit the form. For example, it may have a series of photos of cats and dogs where you have to select only the cats in order to prove that you are human.

CAPTCHAs are very effective but not 100% effective because often programs are developed to try to overcome these obstacles on a regular basis. However, as technology advances by way of passing these human tests, other technology arrives that makes it even more difficult.

This brings us to ReCAPTCHA. ReCAPTCHA, developed by Carnegie Mellon University, is very much the same thing as CAPTCHA except for one additional routine. The ReCAPTCHA was developed in order to put the internet to work doing what their computers were unable to do. Large libraries of books are being put into digital format every day but computers are often unable to read many of the words that are in these books due to wearing away or hand written material. The ReCAPTCHA acts like a regular CAPTCHA except that the words you are typing into the boxes are often assisting these computers in recognizing these words that often go unrecognized by the computers that are attempting to place these libraries of books into digital format.

In a manner of speaking, Carnegie Mellon University has fooled the world into doing half their job for them without paying you. Not necessarily a bad thing considering that if you were to get paid by the hour for doing this you might pull in a good $1.50 a month. So it all works out for the best in the long run.

A working sample of CAPTCHA can be seen on my own contact form.