Tuesday, November 10, 2009

ReCaptcha

Every time a (non logged in) user posts a new topic or reply, they must fill out an anti-spam filter. Here's some info about CAPTCHAs.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.


reCAPTCHA is digitizing old NYTimes, and every time a user fills out a CAPTCHA you are helping. Logged in users do not need to fill out a CAPTCHA, but the vast majority of posts are made from users who are not logged in. Combining the total number of replies and topics, we can estimate the total number of successful CAPTCHAs at 799,087.

That's quite a number. If we figure an average of 10 seconds per CAPTCHA, that equals out to:

2,219.68 Hours
92.48 Days
55.5 Work Weeks (40 Hour)

It would have taken a human being, working 40 hours a week, over a year to do the same amount of reCAPTCHAs. That's kind of cool to think about. I wonder how many days/weeks of NYTimes we've helped digitize.

Take care,
Peter

Source:
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

7 comments:

  1. It still doesn't stop the spammers.

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  2. can u fix indiana university\s board

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  3. none because I sometimes misstype and they think it's correct

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  4. I find answering captcha interesting sometimes I type the wrong symbols they still end up correct. I'm wondering where they get the name though. It's weird.

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