Despite the amount of hits my blog gets a day, which can get up to 1500 on a good day, I usually only get an average of 5 comments per post. I’m not complaining whatsoever. Even though I wish I was getting more feedback I believe people should be able to express their opinion whenever they wanted to and not simply because I felt the need to express mine.

Like I mentioned before, this post isn’t about the amount of comments I’m not getting. The issue here is the amount I am getting - by spammers. It’s a pain in the ass when i have to scroll through hundreds of comments trying to find the ONE my good friend Mr. F just sent me - I’m sure he’s gonna add his remarks even to this one too

Almost a year ago, Brent Corrigan added CAPTCHA to his blog comment section and Boy! I thought it was pretentious lol little I know I was gonna go through the same thing not too far in the future. He was bitching and complaining about the amount of spam comments he had to go through and I thought, really?! How much spam can u really get? I have no idea how much he was getting when he finally decide to put a stop to it. I know I received over 100 yesterday and that just did it for me.

Starting today, right before you add your comment you’re gonna see this little box with two words inside. All you have to do is type the two words and click on submit comment. I want to apologize for the trouble to my average 5 blog commentators that this may cause but at least I’ll have more time to write posts lol instead of spending my time fishing through spam mail trying to find your good comments

This new technology, is called reCAPTCHA and for each word that you type you’re actually helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. If you’re interested in how this technology works, keep reading, otherwise just go straight to the comment section lol just kidding!

“To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.”

Ah! who knew you could get useful information here too? hehehe

Be back soon (very soon!)

xo Luke

ps: To Ken Knox, if you read this, no … this time ;o)

- by request on my last comment, here’s a picture of me on my sexy computer, cuz smart and cute guys are the best!

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