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Frequently Asked Questions
I love this, how can I help? Most importantly, you can add reCAPTCHA to your site :) If you have no Website that requires a CAPTCHA, perhaps you want to protect your email address by using reCAPTCHA MailHide. Other ways of helping are telling your friends about our project, or writing plugins for different environments.
I've seen reCAPTCHA t-shirts. How can I get one? You can buy one at CafePress (we'd like to give them for free to everybody, but we spend all our money running and supporting this system).
Can I get reCAPTCHA in other languages? Yep! See our Client API documentation
Does reCAPTCHA have the capacity to accommodate large amounts of traffic? Definitely. reCAPTCHA has distributed locations and multiple servers. The only thing we ask is to be contacted beforehand if you expect your site to constantly need more than 1 million reCAPTCHAs solved per day. reCAPTCHA is used by many large sites — we display over 100 million CAPTCHAs every day.
When showing reCAPTCHA to the user, is it possible not to show the reCAPTCHA logo? We allow you to customize the theme of reCAPTCHA with our Client API. You are still required to have text on your website which states that you are using reCAPTCHA, however with our theming API, you are free to do this in a way that blends in to your site.
Aren't you increasing the time users spend solving CAPTCHAs by requiring them to type two words instead of one? Actually, no. Most CAPTCHAs on the Web ask users to enter strings of random characters, which are slower to type than English words. reCAPTCHA requires no more time to solve than most other CAPTCHAs.
Are reCAPTCHAs less secure than other CAPTCHAs that use random characters instead of words? Because we ask users to enter two words instead of one, we can increase the security of reCAPTCHA against programs that attempt to guess the words using a dictionary. Whenever an IP address fails one reCAPTCHA, we can show them more distorted words, and give them challenges for which we know both words. The probability of randomly guessing both words correctly would be less than one in ten million.
Are CAPTCHAs secure? I heard spammers are using porn sites to solve them: the CAPTCHAs are sent to a porn site, and the porn site users are asked to solve the CAPTCHA before being able to see a pornographic image. CAPTCHAs offer great protection against abuse from automated programs. While it might be the case that some spammers have started using porn sites to attack CAPTCHAs (although there is no recorded evidence of this), the amount of damage this can inflict is tiny (so tiny that we haven't even seen this happen!). Whereas it is trivial to write a bot that abuses an unprotected site millions of times a day, redirecting CAPTCHAs to be solved by humans viewing pornography would only allow spammers to abuse systems a few thousand times per day. The economics of this attack just don't add up: every time a porn site shows a CAPTCHA before a porn image, they risk losing a customer to another site that doesn't do this.