reCaptcha - Add Captcha (Image Verification) to Stop Spam and Bot Comments on your Wordpress Blog

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Aaah...this is painful. This is my 5th continous wordpress plugin review and there are 5 more to go. I am feeling a little tired so will finish this one and call of the day You can check previous wordpress plugin reviews here, here, here and here.

reCAPTCHA is created by the original creators of the CAPTCHA mechanism. While using this Plugin you help to read scanned books completely. In order to use that Plugin you need to create an Account at reCAPTCHA.net.

What is reCaptcha ?

This Plugin adds to your every Comment form an additional CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA is based upon two words which needs to be inputed both correctly. The first word is already known by the System, and that’s the prove to see if you’re a bot or a human(bots will mostly input it wrong). The second word is from some book scanning, where the OCR wasn’t able to find out what word it currently read. These not readable words are stored within a Database, and then showed to the user as part of the reCAPTCHA. As soon as the word got enough consistent guessings the word is stored with this meaning and can be used as source for the first part of this CAPTCHA.

How to Install Captcha Plugin for Wordpress

Grab your copy from reCAPTCHA, unzip the folder and upload it to your WP plugins directory. After you activated the Plugin a new Tab is created within Options called reCAPTCHA.

Now you need to create an Account on reCAPTCHA.net, the registration requires an Username and Email, optional they would like to know your First & Last Name. After that Step you need to insert your Website where you want to use this account on(Note for every other Top Level Domain you need to add it to your account and get other keys).

Now you get your Public & Private Key, both needs to be inputed within the reCAPTCHA admin page in WP, after you inputed these Keys to the Plugin, press “Update Options” to store the keys and get reCAPTCHA useable. Now you can visit some of your Posts and you’ll see that there’s now something like this:

The reCAPTCHA needs to be inputed as well in order to get the Comment posted, if that isn’t the case the Page is showed again with all Input remained.

Dependencies and known Issues

reCAPTCHA runs as Webservice, so no dependencies are used. Everything needed is retrieved from the Internet.

In the End...

A good CAPTCHA, which is mostly really strong as if no commercial used OCR software , which is used to read books, is able to read such words mostly no Spambot will it either. At the same time you help to digitize old books. As this runs as webservice you have as well not to care about the Plugin itself as if updates are needed it will be done through the Service itself. It will lower you total spam amount extremely, only user created Spam will get through.