Everybody hates spam and one way to prevent spam is to use captcha. But there are hundreds, perhaps, thousands of captcha scripts. You are probably looking for one that is easy to install, looks good, is reliable and free.
I believe reCaptcha meets all of these conditions and more. By using recaptcha on your site, you and your visitors will be helping to digitize old texts. You’ve probably seen reCaptcha been used in many sites, Craigslist is an example. To be able to use reCaptcha you must first sign up for an API key by going to the reCaptcha website. The API key is unique for every domain, but you can sign up for as many domains as you want.
This captcha script can be programmed in PHP, ASP.NET, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java and Cold Fusion. You can use recaptcha in any site even in a CMS since there are plugins for the following
- WordPress
- MediaWiki
- phpBB
- Movable Type (contributed by Josh Carter)
- Drupal (contributed by Rob Loach)
- Symfony (contributed by Arthur Koziel)
- Typo3 (contributed by Jens Mittag. See also the example of using the plugin)
- NucleusCMS (contributed by Matt)
- vBulletin (contributed by Magnus)
- Joomla (contributed by Robert van den Breemen)
- JSP Mailhide (by Tamas Magyar)
I must admit that some of the words are really hard to guess, but reCaptcha comes with a refresh button that will return new words but will not refresh the whole page, it also has a sound button that will read the word to the user.
This is how reCaptcha looks installed in one of our WordPress blogs.
