reCAPTCHA: Digitize Books to get my Email Address
To keep bots from scraping our email addresses from our web sites for SPAM purposes, but still provide a way for humans to contact us, we have come up with many ways to obfuscate our email addresses. From using contact forms with no publicly visible email address, which isn't a good choice, to "user [at] domain [dot] com" notation (or a variant), the options have always been limited and not user-friendly. This hasn't changed.However, while the non-user-friendly nature of email address hiding must remain (if its easy, the bots will get it), the usefulness of the process has just taken a leap forward. We are all familiar with CAPTCHAs, the squiggly letters in an image we must type in to gain access to a website or sign up for a service. CAPTCHAs are used to fend off automated scripts that might otherwise gain access to the system it protects, since only humans can read the letters and type them in.
A new service called reCAPTCHA has been launched to combine the anti-bot power of CAPTCHAs with the reading power of humans, to digitize books. Some great explanations of this service and its benefits are here, here, and here. While reCAPTCHA has been around for a few months, they recently added a feature that caught my eye; the reCAPTCHA Mailhide service. You simply submit your email address on their form and a URL comes out the other end. Instead of publishing your email address, you publish the link to the Mailhide service. When the person who wants to email you clicks the link, they are presented with a CAPTCHA containing words from a book. Upon successful entry in the text box, your email address (clickable, even) is exposed. When you click on the "Contact me via email" link in the "About" box on this site, you will see this in action.
While it adds a step or two for the person who wants your email address, it is definitely worth it. It helps out a great cause, keeps the bots out, and within two steps fully exposes your email address to the intended party. Hiding from bots will never be easy, so it might as well be useful.
Labels: technology
This entry was posted by Lincoln Murphy, on
Wednesday, September 19, 2007.
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