reCAPTCHA

You will notice a new feature on my site: a challenge for every comment.

While doing some research for a friend over at AllSeattleWebDesign on the use of things called CAPTCHA’s (those little text-ish thingies you get on blogs for example where you must type in the goofy looking word) I found that I should be able to install it fairly easily here. So I did.

Now, I don’t have much trouble with comment spammers, it comes and goes. But this particular captcha does/may do a couple of things:

1) It may relieve me of manually approving all comments all the time. I am going to leave the manual option on for now, maybe next year (2009) I will turn it off if things go well.

2) It adds to the library of digitized texts because one of the words you type is actually reported back to an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) effort scanning old texts. Then, we the commenters, actually supply them with [theoretically] a known human who is more likely to accurately report the text for the OCR tools.

3) This reCAPTCHA may impede some of my readers ability to make comments, especially those of you with less than perfect eyesight. If it is hard, easy, doable, or otherwise I would like to hear from you. I can just as easily UN-plug this thing. Please note, it has an audible option button that will say the words and then you type them. Interesting, but in the end only as good as the speakers on your computer or the anvil in your ear. Let me know.

4) This reCAPTCHA is usable by anyone on our zwise domain as the public and private key combination is ‘keyed’ to our domain and any subdomains. Let me know if you are interested and I will pass along the information.
5) It may slow down the site. If you feel that things are tedious, I mean the speed of my blog loading, again let me know. It is hideous right now but I think it may the time of night. I get this a lot and then during the day it is faster. Not sure what gives but tell me if you experience a repeated problem.

6) Did I mention that it is hideously ugly and absolutely destroys my gestalt [or whatever you call it] on my theme. I will work on that one.
I know, I know, you want to see The Mermaids, but it is late and I am tired.
I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait.