Fighting Spam with ReCAPTCHA

For those that don’t know, a CAPTCHA is the image you see when filling out a form that you’re required to type out. The main purpose for these images is to fight spam. The term was coined in 2000 by Carnegie Mellon University and stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

ReCAPTCHA is a fantastic (free) CAPTCHA service designed also by Carnegie Mellon University that allows a website to protect themselves against spam. For example, now when a user goes to Register or submit a Support Request on WebBasedCron, they’ll see something like this:

To submit the form, the user will need to type in the text correctly. The best part about ReCAPTCHA is that by fighting spam it’s also helping to digitize books. You can learn more about it here, but basically the words displayed in the images are taken directly from real books. A fantastic innovation on an originally great idea.

Web Based Cron