After I switched to reCAPTCHA the other day, it took all of half an hour before I saw my first bit of trackback spam. reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about trackbacks, unfortunately, so I withheld judgment.

The trackback spam was shortly followed by a bunch of comment moderation emails from WordPress. It seemed there were dozens of humans out there carefully pasting spam into my comments form and solving the CAPTCHAs. What a sad thought. So I turned Spam Karma 2 back on. After some help, I understood that reCAPTCHA saves spam that does not pass the CAPTCHA for your perusal. (Does anyone actually go back and peruse spam?) Quoth the FAQ:

reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.

I read this before installing the plugin, but found it confusing. “reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam”? Which comments? All of them? Why would it do that? So, naturally, I ignored the warning.

It turns out that I wasn’t the only one confused. The ambiguity could have been eliminated by adding one word to that sentence. So an exercise in fighting spam becomes a lesson in copywriting.

I still love the reCAPTCHA concept, but I have to stick with Spam Karma for now — unless someone knows a solution for catching only trackback spam.

If you have a blog of your own, you know what a CAPTCHA is; for the rest of you, you’ve probably cursed at more than one. CAPTCHAs are those garbled images of words that you must decipher on many web sites to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spamming robot. If you’re like me, you find them at least mildly annoying. Until now, anyway.

I stumbled across reCAPTCHA over the weekend. Most CAPTCHAs use random words to prove you’re human, but this one shows you images of actual scanned text. The text comes from books that the Internet Archive has scanned but not digitized. You get to do the digitizing yourself by typing in the word. If enough people complete enough CAPTCHAs on enough sites, pretty soon that adds up to a bunch of books archived for posterity.

I love this idea for several reasons. It’s crowdsourcing at its best. It’s also a perfect example of what 37signals calls judo: break a big task down into many small steps; better yet, take something negative and turn it into a positive. It’s a good cause that happens to be book-related.

When I saw there was a WordPress plugin available, I installed it right here for you all to try out. Now go help save the world.

Plus, I could use more commenters.

The current wave of artists from the U.K., including KT Tunstall, James Blunt, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, is setting new standards across a multitude of musical genres, that you simply must catch.

(I took a photo for maximum effect, but it was too blurry to use.)