A few of my readers here have been commenting recently on their struggle with this new Captcha that I have installed on my blog. So I thought I would first explain why it’s here and then explore how to use it so that your messages aren’t lost.

1. The reason for its being
Prior to installing Recaptcha on my comments, I would spend countless hours each week removing spam from my comments. I could have saved a heap of time by just pushing the DELETE button on the ones that Movable Type marked as suspect. However, I would invariably find one or two genuine comments in the midst of all the disgusting tripe that I waded through.

Even if there was only 1 comment in the sea of hundreds it was still worth sacrificing my time to acknowledge that you gave up some of yours. I can’t say I was always faithful and I’m sure there were still some that I missed.

After installing Recapthca on Blotanical as part of the submission process, I realised that this was certainly a great step forward in reducing spam on my other blogs, and predominantly this one.

Since its installation, I have not had one piece of spam to deal with meaning that I can now use that time to spend researching posts, commenting on other blogs or making Blotanical far more exciting.

And, as Annie intimated in one of her comments this Captcha process has another purpose that makes it worthy of its use. Each time you enter the words that are displayed you are helping in the process of deciphering books that were published prior to the digital era. Pretty cool, huh?

2. How to use this thing without losing your comments
You will notice these three buttons on the right side of the input field. These are put there to help you process the correct words and speed you along on your journey.

The first one is the Reload button. If the displayed text is too garbled to make sense of the words then you can click this button and it will refresh the display with two new words. You can keep doing this until you can correctly decipher the words.

The second one is the Audio button. Rather than viewing the words you can hear them and then type the corresponding answer into the requested field. I’m not sure what your hearing is like but I haven’t had much success with this feature.

Finally, the last one is an Information button. Clicking this takes you to the Recaptcha site so that you can learn a little more about the widget and its purpose.

Hopefully this has cleared up some confusion and if you have any problems with this please let me know.