After receiving 37 spam comment emails in one night yesterday, I went looking for a better auto-comment anti-spamming solution. Turns out, the good folks over at BlogEngine.net have already taken care of it. With the newest update that came out just last week there’s now a captcha system in place. BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! This particular captcha system actually does something productive! Bounce on over to http://recaptcha.net/ and read about what they are doing. All those annoying word-images you retype are actually part of a global digitization project. When books are scanned for digital versions sometimes the computer can’t figure them out, due to age or wear etc, this system takes those words that a computer can’t read and lets people enter them. So, the user gets authenticated and the book getting its problems solved! What a wonderful use of what is otherwise a pain in the ass. 🙂 In a single day, across the world wide web around 150,000 man-hours worth of words are typed out through this project. 🙂