First of all, hat tip to Julian’s Twitter message for this one.

Now, maybe you’ve noticed that the comments on FI have been a little slow lately (not to mention the posts themselves). At first, I was thinking that no one was commenting because, well, no one was really writing. But then I remembered, a few weeks back, because spam fighting was getting a little too tiresome, I set Wordpres so that “Users must be registered and logged in to comment.” Besides fighting spam, this also meant that:

1. No random person could leave a comment
2. Even regulars had to take an extra step or two before they could comment.

In other words, in the interest of the site’s security, I sacrificed your freedom. Don’t let anyone tell you that George Bush doesn’t think he’s doing the right thing. But of course, that doesn’t make it right.

So, this morning, I unchecked the “Users must be registered…” option and now anyone and their mother is free to leave a comment.

With that being said, I don’t want to go back to deleting a dozen spam comments a day, and thanks to Julian’s tip, I don’t need to.

So, without further adieu, I’d like to introduce you to a little program called ReCaptcha.

Most of know what “captchas” are: it’s that box with weird little words, symbols, and numbers in it that you have to fill out to prove you’re a human. Most of them time, the symbols in the box are randomly generated by some computer somewhere, and then they’re folded, bent, spindled, and mutilated until only the fierce pattern-recognition-process of the human mind can detect what the hell it is it’s looking at.

They have a downside, of course, which is sometimes the captcha is really fucking weird, and not even a human can make it out (for some more interesting captchas, check out this collection of Craziest Captchas on the Web).

So, how is ReCaptcha different? I’ll let them explain:

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.

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….Each new word that cannot be read correctly by the computer 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.

Which means, every time you leave a comment on Fluid Imagination, you’ll be helping to “archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world [by] digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age.”

Who knew? Leave a comment. Make the world a better place. Good times.