Now comment spammers will do some good too

While I haven’t been active here for the past half year, the same can’t be said for comment spammers. Even though forwhatitworths.com is yet to become a high traffic blog, I needed to moderate a significant number of comment spams every day.

Something had to be done. However, I’m still not totally convinced by the accuracy of spam filters, and by now we know that CAPTCHA is not a silver bullet either. This means no matter which route I take, I’ll still have to keep on moderating. With reCAPTCHA, finally, the spam-fighting became useful at last.

I’ve heard about reCAPTCHA a while ago, and really liked the idea of using computer-illegible text scans of old public archives instead of algorithmically generated images for telling humans and bots apart, however, only this recent article on arstechnica convinced me to give a try.

I’ve quickly and easily set up this wordpress plugin, and registered for the necessary API keys at recaptcha.org. Now any new comment needs some text-recognition work too, but at least it is for some greater good, as any recognized word will contribute to the digitalization effort of old public archives.

Let the comments come, the spammers fade, and the electronic libraries fill up with quality archives at the same time!