We just integrated ReCaptcha's nifty Word Verification API into the contact forms for all our sites, e.g. Site Contact, Custom Forms, Comments, etc. They are kind enough to allow us to customize the look to be less obnoxious than their standard design (Thank You ReCaptcha!). One of the nice features is that it's handicap accessible, allowing the blind to "listen" to words, which is super cool. And the whole project, is an exercise in collective processing power of the internet. Everyone who verifies a word is participating in a project to digitize old books! They have two words they provide, one is a control word (which they know) and the other is a new word that needs to be digitized. If you get the control word right, you pass (you don't know which is which). But in the process you also digitize the new word, and when the new word gets a high enough accuracy, it gets added to the accepted words.

It's  a great little API. And now, hopefully people will not be getting as many scandalous random words from the dictionary, which was very common with our old method. Who knew the dictionary had so many naughty words.

A big thanks to City Church of San Francisco, who kindly subsidized part of the cost of this new feature to make it a priority on our production schedule. You can also anticipate a new "Forums" feature coming soon, partly subsidized by these good folks as well.