CAPTCHAs with a purpose
It’s estimated that 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved around the world each day. In light of this, Carnegie Mellon has created a program called reCAPTCHA that actually puts all of this superfluous work to use. Read on to see what this is all about and how you can help out.
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captcha, recaptcha, coldfusion, adobe, custom tag, web, web development, web design, marketing, internet marketing
When a user fills out a CAPTCHA generated by reCAPTCHA, they are helping academics digitize words in books. The system generates 2 words to solve in the CAPTCHA. Here’s their description on how it works:
The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
And it just so happens that there’s a ColdFusion custom tag developed to display reCAPTCHAs in your ColdFusion applications. So use the tag and have your users contribute to the cause!
Update: I’ve decided to eat my own dogfood and install the reCAPTCHA WordPress plugin on this here blog. I’m using it on most of my projects now.