I’ve just added a “CAPTCHA” (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) widget to the article comments to make it easier for people to comment without having to await moderation. Using a technique like this allows us to (mostly) tell comments made by real humans from those generated by automated spam posters.

The one we have chosen is reCAPTCHA, which chooses the words you verify based on digitized examples of scanned books. By participating you are helping to accurately digitize books for archival purposes. Easier to comment, harder to spam and we are helping preserve and digitize printed artefacts. Everybody wins!

In a nutshell, you will be asked to type in two words based on a graphic. If you can’t read the two words you can always select another pair. The tests are rather English-centric and the words are expected to be typed in using the correct character case.

So, please free to try it out here, as it helps me determine if the plugin is working.

Oh, and don’t worry if you can’t get things to work. If the comment submission fails three times, we fall back to the old method of moderating comments manually.

Thanks.

— Site Administrator

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