Classifieds Now Equipped with reCAPTCHA

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

It’s been a productive weekend that the planet chiropractic office. We’ve been working on some upgrades to the classified ads system, in order to provide better service to those using the website for selling and buying chiropractic equipment.

Thanks to recent activities such as yesterday’s visit from Mr. Benson in Nigeria, and previous visits from Smith Matt, Tom Marley, and Mike Rapp (three or four are suspected to be the same individual), we’ve added some new features that kick in when someone replies to someone else’s posted classified advertisement. Take a look at the screenshot below.

This is a screenshot of the new reCAPTCHA feature we added to the classified ad system. I don’t expect it will completely stop scammers and automated bots from sending e-mails to those with ads posted, but it should slow things down a bit.

Along with the regular form information are two words that need to be typed in in order to continue on (there is also an option for playing audio instead of reading text).

What’s cool about this CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is that when people fill the information out, they are helping to digitize books.

According to the reCAPTCHA website, there are approximately 60 million CAPTCHAs solved by humans around the world every day. In each of those cases an estimated 10 seconds of human time is spent solving these puzzles. Putting this puzzle work to good use results in more than 150,000 hours of aggregating work done each day. The “solved” puzzles helped to get books digitized for the Web.

When I checked the site earlier today, there was mention that current puzzle solving was helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times. I think that’s pretty cool.

So whether you’re responding to a chiropractic practices for sale advertisement, chiropractic employment, or equipment for sale from a private party, know that you’ll be doing your 10 second part (or more if you’re responding to multiple ads) to help digitize books and other information to be put online.