Added reCAPTCHA to VTOR

Brief break in the MMO/MMORPG action.

With more readers and site visitors VTOReality.com has also gained its share of spammers unfortunately. In an effort to help curb the growing automated comment spam problems, we’re experimenting with the reCAPTCHA project in the comments section. For those not familiar with this CAPTCHA there are a couple of things that make reCAPTCHA interesting:

- when you enter the CAPTCHA you are helping to scan unrecognized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) words in books
- there is an optional audio challenge for sight impaired readers, so it’s not only text only CAPTCHAs

How to use
Take a look at the screenshot below and please follow along.

Enter your comment as you normally would. Then move down to the reCAPTCHA box.

1. enter the first word shown with the line in it and add a space at the end
2. enter the second word shown with the line in it
3. click submit to send the reCAPTCHA, if your words match the picture then you’re comment will be submitted as normal. If your words don’t match an error message will say the CAPTCHA was incorrect and you should click back on the browser to try entering in a new CAPTCHA response.

Can’t read the reCAPTCHA?
If you get a CAPTCHA that you can read very well, just click the refresh button on the left of the reCAPTCHA menu to be served a different CAPTCHA.

Does the reCAPTCHA go away?
Good news for those who don’t like CAPTCHAs. Readers who leave three or more approved comments and allow the VTOR site cookie with your Wordpress credentials (name, email and URL) will not have to enter the CAPTCHA. Currently VTOR doesn’t require any sort of registration and login to leave comments so hopefully the reCAPTCHA addition doesn’t deter you, friendly reader, from leaving a comment.

We’re not trying to punish human readers with this change. We welcome your feedback about this change, good bad or indifferent. Our group will be voting on whether to keep or remove reCAPTCHA from this site at our June 15 weekly meeting. You’re welcome to attend that meeting as well to voice any CAPTCHA-related concerns.