New Tweak to the Site: reCAPTCHA

So, I'm just completely tired of having to filter out the endless "viagra cialis levitra cialis buy viagra..." comment spam, and also, it frustrates me that people can't leave comments without me approving them, so then people don't end up leaving comments, methinks.

Therefore I've done two things: I've turned off administrator comment approval, and installed the reCAPTCHA Drupal module. reCAPTCHA is pretty cool—I didn't know about it until a few weeks ago, but I'd heard others talking about it. What it is, basically, is a way to digitize scanned texts through distributed human processing. It's kind of the inverse of distributed computing; it uses human brains to produce output meaningful to computers. Well, technically speaking, a scanned text is just fine and dandy to a computer, it doesn't really care what the hell it is, it's all bits...but I digress.

The reason this is awesome is because OCR has a crap ability to make sense out of scanned in text compared to humans reading the text. So, having a bunch of humans doing a word here and a word here ends up being a much higher rate of success for accuracy than making a computer do it. Make sense? If not, here is a more thorough explanation of how reCAPTCHA works.

In any case, this is set up to allow you to submit comments on my posts now without needing my approval, and hopefully it'll keep all the annoying spam bots from posting crap as well. Let me know what you think.