Sat, 03 May 2008
reCAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs are a name for programs designed to test if they are being used by another computer (a "bot") or by a humamn. They do this by asking the user to do a task that presumably can't be done by a computer; for example, reading obscured words.
reCAPTCHA is a well-known CAPTCHA service that takes images from the Internet Archive's book scanning project. Some words are hard
But as for spam in MediaWiki, it seems that simply using the blacklists mentioned earlier is not enough; the Reed Free Culture wiki (for example) has been spammed beyond recognition with link spam. So I am deploying reCAPTCHA to show a CAPTCHA to users when they register, and showing a CAPTCHA to anonymous users who try to add links.
P.S. Attentive people may consider a personal link I have to the Internet Archive's book scanning project. That has nothing to do with my liking reCAPTCHA. (-:
