Everyone running a fairly popular blog knows about the problem with comment spam. To put it short, bad people polute the comment forms on blogs to spread links and commercial info about their products or web sites.

I have been using several plugins to fight the spam, but lately the preassure from the “spam bots” have increased to a level where it puts preassure on the server I am running. I don’t like to let my readers down by making it difficult to comment, but I am now forced to install a small trick to verify that it is real people and not a robot that tries to leave a comment.

I have decided to put the small piece of work you have to do when you verify yourself into a good cause by using the reCaptcha plugin to verify real humans.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

From now on you will have to write down two words from an image when leaving comments. When you do that two things happen:

1. You have verified for eirikso.com that you are human
2. You have helped digitizing a book

Yes. A good cause. You find the details here. And to put that page short:

reCAPTCHA asks commenters to read two words from a book. One of these words proves that they are a human, not a computer. The other word is a word that a computer couldn’t read. Because the user is known to be a human, the reading of that word is probably correct. So you don’t get comment spam, and the world gets books digitized. Everybody wins!

So, feel good when you put in that extra bit of work to be able to comment!