We felt that the folks at reCAPTCHA already came up with a catchy slogan, so it makes sense to use it as the title for this post.
For those of you looking to add a “captcha” feature, that is a feature which is located within or near your contact form and stops the thousands of spam messages that are sent to your site everyday, reCAPTCHA is one to consider.
Unlike many other spam blockers, reCAPTCHA is making a strive to help develop OCR, or Optical Character Recognition. The system is not perfect and reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitally scanning books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web for we humans to decipher.
The potential drawback for use by the masses:
reCAPTCHA looks a little weird and does not fit with the rest of the page. This lack of uniformity may cause some concern, particularly to infrequent users of the internet. The red box with multiple (albeit helpful) functions and a scramble illegible word serves its purpose right at the conversion phase – a wee bit worrisome! While there are other CAPTCHAs available, this is one that is helping to move society forward so that we will one day be able to access any book, manuscript, flyer, coupon or otherwise from our computers, iPhones, Blackberrys or other handhelds.
Consider its benefits, and please do not make your decision to use or not use it from simply this post. Here is a like to the reCAPTCHA site, and how it can be used for free!
