I built a new version of the captcha challenge-response designed to stop spammers, with a twist appropriate to Greater Greater Washington: it asks you questions about the Metro map.

Spammers have been more and more successful at breaking through the reCaptcha system, even though the puzzles have been getting so hard some real humans have trouble. Maybe this one will not be so easy, or at least they won’t bother writing custom code to crack it just for us. Here’s an example:

Help me find bugs by giving it a try. A live one will appear below, in the comment area for just this post, for now. The live captcha will appear once you click into the comment form. You can also make it appear on any other post by adding /format/mapcaptcha to the end of the URL for that post.

I might try to add additional types of questions or more maps with other information about the Washington region as well; give your suggestions!

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Tagged: about ggwash, meta

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.