Gwolle & Google’s reCAPTCHA

You shouldn’t use a captcha anyawy, only as last resort. There are much better antispam methods included. Did you try them out? They are transparent to the user.

I think reCAPTCHA is bad usability anyway. People were reporting issues with it, without any support from the reCAPTCHA people.
They also can give you usability nightmares, like endless screens with pictures that you have to click, where you are essentially blackboxed.

I don’t like the current CAPTCHA either. It is not good for accessibility.
If someone has a better option here I would like to hear it.

Well, I’ll not use CAPTCHA, thanks!

Hi,

we work with Really Simple CAPTCHA – well configured, the required captcha is working and how ever: we receive a lot of spam. Honeypot etc. is also active, but we don’t like to manage all the spam entrys day by day. So a working captcha should be the best solution.

But you asked for a better solution:

Google reCAPTCHA is also available as invisible reCAPTCHA. Means: No action required since the user isn’t bizzare… xD. No captcha for inconspicuous users.
This is the best solution in my eyes.

invisible reCAPTCHA is only invisible if you enable third party tracking in your browser. If you have that disabled, you will get a bad experience. I don’t think that is good for users.
You can still write your own plugin that adds reCAPTCHA to Gwolle Guestbook. It’s just that I don’t think it is any good.

About the spam, did you try Akismet and Stop Forum Spam? Both third party services are really good at catching spam. Since you don’t seem to have a problem with third party services, you should give them a try. They are transparent to the user and will give a good experience.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Marcel Pol.

Hi Marcel,

thank you for you quick reply. Also for the second tipp, but Akismet and Stop Forum Spam seems not EU-DSGVO? compliant. So the usage is unfortunately legally questionable in the EU.

Best,
Carsten

Hmm, you have a point. They are US third party services collecting user data.

However, I don’t see reCAPTCHA as compliant in spirit, even though it may be strictly speaking.
Site-specific, there doesn’t seem to be much harm in having Google (an advertising agency) load a javascript and see what forms people are using.
User-specific however, they use it to track users accross all kinds of websites and submitted forms and build up a database with that user info. I don’t think that is very much in line with the intention of the GDPR.

Again, I do not plan to integrate reCAPTCHA, since I think it is a user hostile service. If you really do want it, it is possible to write a plugin that adds it to Gwolle.

About the spam, you could just play a bit more with the anti-spam features. If Akismet and Stop Forum Spam are not right for you, there is the Custom Quizz Question, which should be much better than a captcha, and still more userfriendly.

Would you care to try out the current development version. There are some changes that might improve anti-spam efforts.
It is just a point release, I would like some feedback, quite a lot of code changed.
The Nonce and Honeypot should work better here.
I just committed them, the new zipfile should be available in a while.