If you have tested the latest addition to the labs (see: New lab added: Live Mail), you would have noticed that there is a captcha (human verification) used to protect against bots creating e-mail addresses for worldwide domination. I could have created my own captcha in PHP, but I decided to use reCAPTCHA.

What’s so special about reCAPTCHA? Well in addition to protecting your registration, comments page, e-mail address, or wiki, it also helps the Internet Archive with it’s project of scanning old books for reading and archiving. Every time you use reCAPTCHA for verification, you’re helping to correct a word that was scanned into a computer but could not be read correctly by that system’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.

If you’re interested in helping out a great site like the Internet Archive, I’d suggest checking this out. reCAPTCHA is compatible with various development languages and web applications such as WordPress.