Great self-contained spam protection

I’ve installed ALTCHA on a non-WordPress website a little under a year ago, and it’s been protecting that website from spam registrations (these were an issue there!) ever since.

Now I’m using it on a couple WordPress websites as well, and it seems to work just as fine, albeit it’s only been a few days.

If you’ve ever been annoyed by having to repeatedly select busses or fire hydrants, or move parrots around, and you don’t want to push that experience onto your visitors, ALTCHA can be the solution. It’s non-intrusive to normal users (the calculation performed only takes a couple seconds), but is a great way to deter spammers, who would rather automatically submit a few hundred forms than spend that same amount of CPU time on a calculation required to only submit that one form on your page.

Oh, and I love that this plugin is open source and no-nonsense. It will never clutter your WordPress UI with calls to upgrade to pro or notifications about Black Friday sales. It adds a single sub-menu item under Settings, and is very civil in all regards. And it also respects your visitor privacy: no data will be transmitted to other servers than yours by default due to having it installed, unless you explicitly configure it to use ALTCHA’s cloud API, which adds some extra functionality in addition to filtering out bots.

All that said, it’s not a silver bullet of course, and you may want to keep Akismet enabled too as a second line of defence.

• This topic was modified 3 months ago by Rimas.