Posts Tagged ‘forums’

What are CAPTCHAs?

Thursday July 16th, 2009

A CAPTCHA is a validation code (combination of letters and numbers), which you are asked to enter before submitting information to a website. CAPTCHA is actually an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” CAPTCHAs display an image that people can detect, but computers cannot and it is used to keep malicious computer “bots” and other automated programs from using Web forms.

recaptcha

Actually a good idea, but there’s a lot of time and effort involved in it. Approximately 150.000 hours are spent every day by users around the world trying to decipher CAPTCHAs. Sometimes they use distorted images like wavy letters or a background with a strong pattern, which makes it difficult for humans to read them too. ReCAPTCHA, which we use on motigo, aims not only to make this easier but also to give this lost time a useful purpose.

reCAPTCHA uses real words instead of the code fragments used by conventional CAPTCHAs. The words used by reCAPTCHA are words, which computers could not read when digitalizing a book. So, when you type a reCAPTCHA, you are actually helping to digitalize a book. Read more on the reCAPTCHA website .

Want to use a CAPTCHA on your website? Find out how in Tips&Tricks. For futher informations, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

Localization day

Wednesday May 9th, 2007

Today has been the big localization day.

Two days ago, we announced an update of the forums and guestbooks that was to happen last night. The update was about converting our entire database for forums and guestbooks from latin1 hell to utf8 bliss. The update has allowed us to not only handle special characters without the problems of HTML encoding, but also to offer support for languages which aren’t based on the western alphabet. So this is a happy day for our Arabic, Russian, and Asian users.

Another big update is the support for timezones for guestbooks and forums. To change the timezone for your forum, simply log in with your motigo account, click on “my account” in the top bar, change the timezone to what you prefer, and save your account details. If you wish, you can even change it to another timezone afterwards, and everything will be changed on-the-fly.

We are happy to announce these to features, which has been on the top of the wishlist for a load of motigo users.