reCAPTCHAing the Magic

A little site news for you today.

Comment spam increased significantly on the Veg Blog over the last week or so, even with the Wordpress Akismet plug-in installed.  So, I went and installed a new CAPTCHA-based plug-in.  Now, when you comment, you’ll need to type in two words to verify that you’re actually a human.

Now before you get all grumbly on me, let me tell you the two good things that come of this:

1. I’ve turned off the approval requirement on comments, so your comment will be posted right away (of course, I will still zap any comment I declare “dumb ass”).  This may change, but for now, instant posting.
2. I’m using a cool plug-in called reCAPTCHA.  What it does is makes use of the image-based CAPTCHA to help fix poor OCR-translations of public domain books.  It’s an excellent concept.  Read more about it.

Sometimes a word will come up that’s hard to decipher.  If that happens, just hit the little reload icon on the reCAPTCHA and it will give you two new words.