James O’Sullivan’s Blog

The clever folks over at reCaptha have come up with the brilliant idea of using old book style text in their captcha words. CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is now widely used in websites when signing up for a service, it helps stop spam and bots from gaining access to a websites service.

These characters are difficult for a machine to decipher but humans are able to identify the words which is the idea behind CAPTCHA in the first place.  By using old book style text millions of reCaptcha users can help digitize old books. Building a captcha from scratch is not an easy job and reCaptha does a great job to take this burden away from those who would just like to add it as a plugin to our blog. However I wouldn’t advise the use of reCaptcha as your CAPTCHA tool if you have a critical web application with high traffic.
The web application will have to query the reCaptcha engine each time it’s loaded, which may keep your users waiting!
Pictures are also a nice way alternative to words when generating your CAPTCHA. But of course this hogs more bandwidth so let’s stick to black and white text for now!