reCAPTCHA or reGister (freedom of choice)

Today's short article comments the newest attempt to solve the problem of many people who want to leave comments at the BrainKing.info site but cannot pass the user registration process. Although the easiest way could be to allow anybody to post comments here, it would definitely provoke an open invitation to hundreds of spamming robots which is, unfortunately, an attribute of the contemporary time. On the other hand, if too many restrictions and precautions are applied, it usually discourages possible authors of interesting comments, who want to make a contribution as easily and quickly as possible.

The solution is, as we like it, a mixture of different approaches, which gives people a choice to select the more convenient one (I wrote about some spam fighting methods in the past). The result is:

• Registered BrainKing.info users can post comments in the usual way, as they were doing so far. There is no change to this and since it works for many people, it would be a bad idea to get rid of it.


• If a non-registered user wants to leave a comment, a reCAPTCHA element appears at the comment submit form. When the correct words are written to the particular field, the comment can be submitted without any registration or login.

The advantage of this solution is obvious - who does not want to be bothered by reading and rewriting distorted letters, registers a free BrainKing.info account, because the reCAPTCHA validator is not displayed when a user logs in. And who prefers to post as soon as possible, can prove the reCAPTCHA system that he is a human, not a robot.

And, in order to test whether this technology is spam-proof enough or not, I have added a comment form and a guestbook to this site. Feel free to try them out.