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The Evil lurks in every corner… a danger at every stop… ever on the prowl… it’s insidious! Just when you think it’s safe- it launches itself at you with tremendous force! In wave after wave it swamps you into a helpless blob of frustration. Yes, it has happened. The dreaded Spam has found my blog. Only certain entries though. I haven’t figured out why those entries but I have been getting enough that it has become an annoyance.
Therefore, Col. Panic has installed an add-on to combat the evil monster. Now when you leave a comment you will have to type in two words that are all squiggly. It’s called reCAPTCHA .
It is neat because you will actually be doing something constructive when you decode the words. Instead of just proving you are a human being and not a spam crawling bot you will be helping to digitize books.
As I understand it, books have been scanned into computers and are being “read” by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This will make the books searchable and formattable but the OCR doesn’t always decode the words correctly. This is where you come in–by typing in the distorted words correctly you will be teaching the OCR the right word. The first word will be one that it already knows, if you type it in right then it will assume you typed the second word right. It will then compare it to what other people have typed in to verify and then it will know what word to insert into the book.
It is explained better at the above link and while you are there you can decode more words for the project.
