January 23, 2009

Over the past month or so the site's total number of visits has grown by a noticeable amount. Cool! Unfortunately there's a hidden price of increased web traffic - I am also receiving more and more spam messages through the suggestion and contact forms. Not cool! This is more of a nuisance than anything dangerous, but it's beginning to take up my more of my time to clean house and it pollutes the database with junk data. In order to combat automated spam submissions, I added a small, anti-spam test to both forms. You may have seen these in your web travels before. Technically they are called "CAPTCHAs" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and they require you type a word or phrase you see on the screen to prove that you are human.

There are many CAPTCHA services available, but the one I chose is kind of interesting. It is called reCAPTCHA and it is a free service that helps digitize books, newspapers and old radio shows. The test presents a known word and an unknown word from a scan of an old text. By matching the known word, the reCAPTCHA system assumes you correctly matched the unknown word as well. Over time if enough people agree on what the unknown word was, it is committed as the correct "translation." Neat! You can read more about reCAPTCHA on their website here.

I'll keep an eye on activity over the next weeks and see if the number of either the spam messages or legitimate submissions drop. If it seems that this is deterring people from sending in info, I may have to revisit the service or the implementation. Let me know if you have any problems or if things are acting squirrely. Let's band together fellow humans and help fight spam!

Posted by Lucas at 1:00pm