Solve a CAPTCHA, help the world
I’ve just stumbled upon a great idea named “reCAPTCHA”. The idea is that you use their CAPTCHA challenges to protect your site from spammers and bots, or to hide people’s email addresses - but the cherry on top is that when people solve CAPTCHAs on your site, they also help digitize books by filling in words that OCR could not process.
According to the creators (from the site: “reCAPTCHA is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University “):
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
So they take the words OCR programs fail on (meaning: those are hard CAPTCHAs for bots to solve in the first place) and ask humans to solve them - and when they do, they use the words to fill in the OCR blanks. Now how cool is that? I’m definitely going to look deeper into this when I have a few free moments.
They even have API libraries in several languages, including PHP.
UPDATE: I’ve installed the reCAPTCHA WordPress plugin instead of my old anti-spam challenge. It makes page load time a bit longer, but it’s for a good cause, right? I’ll let it run for a while and see how it works.