Spam has always been annoying, but lately it’s been out of control. Over the past weeks, you may have noticed the crap-load of spam messages being left on my website. I had put off dealing with it since I’ve been overwhelmed by my rotations, residency interviews, board exam studying, and Kaplan work (to pay for all the traveling). Last week, after removing 75 spam messages from my last blog entry, I finally decided to install reCAPTCHA. CAPTCHA actually stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. The reCAPTCHA service I’m using is part of an online effort to digitize printed books using OCR. Words that cannot be read are used by this program to be solved by the user before a message can be posted. This should hopefully hold off those annoying bots in the meantime.