Nobody likes spam, or word verification. It’s a Pain. Or you could look at it as a Challenge.
After watching this video forwarded to me by Ruth from Body, Soul & Spirit I have a new respect for reCaptcha word verification.
Do you like to read? I mean books, online. Well then thank reCaptcha because what this does is digitize books one word at a time. That’s right. By taking 10 seconds out of your life you are helping translate scanned pages from books. “About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day.” We are smarter than computers who can’t read words.
Of course there’s the added bonus of word verification preventing comment spam on our blogs. I appreciate not having to double check the not always reliable blogspot for spam comments. (Sorry about the double negative.) So now I’m going to put word verification back on my blog and challenge you all to figure it out. If you’ll comment that is. Hasta luego.
“The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo.” http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha
Now I feel helpful every time I successfully type a word verification, if I’m right the first time. Otherwise I cuss.(BTW, why have both word verification and moderation?)
I understand about the ReCaptcha idea, but too many are just too hard and they discourage commenters who won't even try. Also, they are even harder to decipher on mobile. So I'm leaving word verification off my blog. So far, blogger has been pretty good about getting all (or most) of the spam. I have seen a huge increase in spam that blogger catches since I took verification off. I do have moderation on for older posts. If it gets unmanageable, I'll put verification back on.
I used to use WV but I quit some time ago. My theory was that the commenters can't get their comment on until I approve it so that seemed well and good to me. Which has happened. One thing I'm happy about since changing my blog is that I lost my neo-nazi guy that used to comment of every post I made. He was a pain and you STILL cannot block a commenter. That needs to be fixed.
I'll still comment, like I said, I see it as a challenge. I need to work my old, tired eyes. Everyone wants everything easy and immediate. Since I travel without a tow car, I am learning to travel by foot, bike and bus again. This is another way of not having immediate access to everything.
I turned mine off, but I see that somehow Blogger made the VWs slightly easier…before there were letters on some sort of black background and that was hard. I find then and now that squinting helps. VW won't stop me from commenting on someone's blog. Must say I have been getting more 'anonymous' comments=spam, and blogger has put them in my spam box, so they don't appear in my comment box. 'tis a pain, all the same.
I will only be commenting on blogs that have verification that I really enjoy. Yours is one of them:)
I have a laptop bought in the UK, therefore an English keyboard. I get a lot of words in the verification that have accents on them which my laptop can only do in word or emails, presumably something to do with me living in France! It drives me bonkers. If I reply to a comment in French, I have to write it in Word, than copy and paste it into the comment. My choice to answer then in French, but not my choice when accents appear in verification!! Diane
I had no idea about this until I saw the video. Now I can treat it as a word puzzle but I don't think I would be happy having to deal with French accents like the commenter before me!
I've never used it and have never had any problems, so until that changes, I'll probably continue without it. Hope you have a great week, Gaelyn!
sylvia
The problem with the new word verification is that they are really hard to read. If a commenter would do it more than once and could not get it, that discourages them from proceeding. I would prefer blog approval and no word verification. Lets see how many times I can get it right.
Somebody commented the other day that the word verification has become a bit trickier. So I decided to take it off and within two hours I had five spam comments containing links, Russian gibberish and sex stuff. Its a catch 22 situation. What to do. I will try to take it off again at some stage, but for now unfortunately it will have to stay on.
I've taken the captcha WV off of my blog. So far I haven't had a spam problem, but I have moderation on comments older than four days and some restrictions on who can comment. I'll see how things go. I will still leave comments on blogs that have the captcha, but sometimes it is very hard to make out the letters.
I didn't know that about captcha, and so that (slightly) mitigates the irritation. However, I now newly resent that we are being pressed unwillingly into service to even a good thing. It's the kind of thing I might go to a website to do voluntarily for a few minutes, but I don't like my blog or commenters to be subjected against their will.
Which is not to suggest you shouldn't use it! And, it's not a surprise here, because I can see right away that you've enabled it, and I can make my decision accordingly before I spill some words into the text box.
So, if we're teaching computers to be smarter, aren't we teaching bots to be smarter, too?
Roxanne
The Good Luck Duck
Huh. That's really very interesting. I have to go pass this along to a few other catcha haters out there.
I went to the site to check things out, and there is a page where we can voluntarily solve captchas to help digitize books. On my own terms – just the way I like it!
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
Roxanne
I have more questions? Do you have more answers? :o) If I'm translating for the purpose of digitizing books, how does the software know I'm right?
Roxanne
Sorry, I'll stop spamming you … right after this comment. I read further in the site, and it explains how it knows I'm right when I give the answer.
Roxanne
Hmm, I changed my mind and am going back to word verification – even though all the spam comments are going to the spam folder, they are just too irritating.