Replacing CAPTCHA with reCAPTCHA ...

Published
2007-08-28 15:32
Written by
lobo - member of the CiviCRM community - view blog guidelines
We've had captcha support for some time in CiviCRM. This is not a very popular feature since getting it to work properly is not trivial (you need the right PHP libraries and the path to the a ttf font on your server) This post by Gordon Heydon, pushed me to investigate ReCAPTCHA, which has a cool tagline: Stop Spam, Read Books. I've seen a few sites in the recent past that have been powered by ReCAPTCHA. This seems something cool, gives us integration with yet another web service (oh what a tangled web we weave, hopefully the internet will not crash anytime soon) and avoids the whole image / font issue which we have had in the past. We also get rid of some code from the package (always a good thing!) I'll probably hack this in when i have some free time over the next few weeks for 2.0. In the meantime, i'm having a fair bit of fun with the new custom group / custom field redesign. More on this in a blog post later this week

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)
2007-08-29 - 03:10

The captcha module for drupal is getting a major overhaul at the moment. (We'll release an RC2 soon).
Besides the image CAPTCHAs from ReCAPTCHA, you should also check out the CAPTCHA Pack module, with several non-image CAPTCHA types (no font issues, no external web service needed).

Anonymous (not verified)
2007-08-29 - 11:41

Rob Loach promptly acted on a feature request I made and the reCAPTCA module now rolls back to a different captcha if recaptcha.net is unavailable.

I'm hoping as well that the internet doesn't crash but at least your captcha-enabled forms will still work as long as users can connect to your site.