More Captcha Options For Wordpress

Increasing options for using Captcha with comments

 
In the last report, we provided information about how to deal with spam from comments and one of those options was to include Catpcha to eliminate automated comments from flooding your posts. While comments is not the only place where you might see spam being included, it is the one which we are focusing on here to provide some examples of ones you might want to consider. As with any Wordpress plugin, you want to make sure that it is part of the approved list of plugins. That will help to insure that you do not have any issues or problems with the plugin.

A new trend in Captcha is the move away from the letters in words displayed in a graphic. I admit that I have some difficulty at times with what I consider unreadable characters which I am trying to type in. This is because machine readable captcha is catching up with the original intent for it. As an example of the new way of Captcha is the idea of playing a game as part of getting validated that you are in fact a human being and not a machine adding the comment. A good example of this is AreYouHuman.com which displays varying games where you have to drag items which are moving around and place them on something else. The first one I saw was to put items related to pancakes on top of the pancakes. There was a saw included, which obviously would not work on pancakes.

This is a new trend which makes using Captcha more fun rather than straining your eyes to try and read what is there. Another one that relies on pictures is Sweet Captcha which displays 4 pictures on the left and on picture on the right. You are asked to pick one of the left hand pictures that matches what you are being told to do. You are then to drag it onto the right hand picture as part of the validation process. It makes this a much easier method of verifying that you are a human being and not a machine.

Another one that is very simplistic and very popular is simply called Captcha. It does not use pictures or images to get you to validate that you are a human. Instead, it wants to have you answer a mathematical question. You can vary between words and numbers and exactly where you have to fill in a value as shown below. This comes from BestWestSoft. As you can see, things can vary as to how they are displayed and exactly where the values can be entered. This one might be easier to crack by those desiring to add spam in your comments, but it is very simple.



While there are many others out there, I did not include any which are not currently supporting the current Wordpress version of 3.3.2. You can find others which support prior versions, but we do not recommend that you seriously consider them. You want any plugin which you might use to work within the current Wordpress version. If not, you are asking for problems with your Wordpress site.

Are there any Captcha plugins which you have seen which are part of the new easier to use method? Add them here in the comments so everyone can benefit.