reCAPTCHA in Django
I first read about ReCAPTCHA in this article in Wired magazine last year.
reCAPTCHA provides a free CAPTCHA web service that pairs together two words from OCR scanned books. One of the words is known and the other couldn't be recognized. The user types in both words not knowing which is unknown to the system. As reCAPTCHA collects the responses for the unknown word they get human verified character recognition. So the millions of users of the system are clearing up millions of unrecognized words. It is a very clever human "cloud computing" system using only seconds of human effort for each use of the system.
I'm using a FIGLet based ASCII CAPTCHA on my websites since it was easy to integrate into the Blosxom writeback plugin. But I wanted to give reCAPTCHA a try while converting my Googility site to Django. John DeRosa made my job trivial by writing up the steps with a clear example.
So I followed his directions which involved installing the recaptcha-client python library on my dev and production systems and obtaining a free public/private license key from the reCAPTCHA site. Then I updated my Django view and template files for the one form that needed CAPTCHA protection. It was dead simple and working within minutes. The only minor addition I'd make to John's article is of course you need to pass the captcha_error variable from your view to the template:
return render_to_response('edit.html', {'form': form, 'captcha_error':captcha_error})
So give reCAPTCHA a try for your next project. It was so easy to do I might even convert my Blosxom blogs to use it via Lars Engel's recaptcha plugin.