Spammity spam, wonderful spam

I have been getting a TON of spam comments on this blog. They never actually appear on the site, because I mark them as spam and they’re deleted, but it has been a real pain having to go on here all the time and mark them all. Therefore, I have installed a new spam-protection device (rather Pythonesque I think; I will refer to it as an SPD). Now, in order to write a comment, one has to prove one is not a robot by typing in letters from weird pictures.

The SPD (sounds pretty weird, huh?) that I installed is called reCAPTCHA. It is very interesting in that it uses the input from the user to digitize books. The database from which it generates the weird pictures contains scans of old books; type that cannot be read by computers and so cannot be digitized. If enough people enter the same word for a given scanned image, reCAPTCHA assumes that that is the correct word. So it is both a highly effective SPD and an effective method of harnessing existing technology to do additional useful work. Pretty fascinating. And of no end of usefulness to webmasters. I highly recommend it.

If you do not understand the title of this post, watch this video.