WP-reCAPTCHA-bp Plugin

NOTE: I’m looking for a new maintainer. Please reach out to
[email protected] if you are interested.

NOTE: I don’t have wordpress 5 installations to try this and plan to stop
updating it. If this is a big issue for you, please let me know so I can
consider to continue doing it. Also, let me know if you are willing to help with testing :).

This is a small modification of the wp-recaptcha plugin to make it work with
BuddyPress. Currently uses recaptcha v2.

You only need this plugin if you use Buddypress with wordpress and want a
recaptcha at the registration page.

It is always rebased on top of wp-recaptcha. See
https://github.com/rata/wp-recaptcha-bp for more info

What is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that protects your site against spam, malicious registrations and other forms of attacks where computers try to disguise themselves as a human; a CAPTCHA is a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart. reCAPTCHA comes in the form of a widget that you can easily add to your blog, forum, registration form, etc.

In addition to protecting your site, reCAPTCHA also helps us digitize old books and newspapers, transcribe street numbers and solve hard AI problems. Learn how reCAPTCHA works and join our forum.

Requirements

• You need the reCAPTCHA keys here.
• Your theme must have a do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); call right before the end of your form (Right before the closing form tag). Most themes do.

To install in regular WordPress and WordPress MultiSite:

1. Upload the wp-recaptcha folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress
3. Get the reCAPTCHA keys here.

1. 

   The reCAPTCHA Settings

2. 

   Comments page with reCAPTCHA

HELP, I’m still getting spam!

There are four common issues that make reCAPTCHA appear to be broken:

1. Moderation Emails: reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so even though the comments don’t actually get posted, you will be notified of what is supposedly new spam. It is recommended to turn off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.
2. Akismet Spam Queue: Again, because reCAPTCHA marks comments with a wrongly entered CAPTCHA as spam, they are added to the spam queue. These comments however weren’t posted to the blog so reCAPTCHA is still doing it’s job. It is recommended to either ignore the Spam Queue and clear it regularly or disable Akismet completely. reCAPTCHA takes care of all of the spam created by bots, which is the usual type of spam. The only other type of spam that would get through is human spam, where humans are hired to manually solve CAPTCHAs. If you still get spam while only having reCAPTCHA enabled, you could be a victim of the latter practice. If this is the case, then turning on Akismet will most likely solve your problem. Again, just because it shows up in the Spam Queue does NOT mean that spam is being posted to your blog, it’s more of a ‘comments that have been caught as spam by reCAPTCHA’ queue.
3. Trackbacks and Pingbacks: reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about pingbacks and trackbacks. You can disable pingbacks and trackbacks in Options > Discussion > Allow notifications from other Weblogs (Pingbacks and trackbacks).
4. Human Spammers: Believe it or not, there are people who are paid (or maybe slave labor?) to solve CAPTCHAs all over the internet and spam. This is the last and rarest reason for which it might appear that reCAPTCHA is not working, but it does happen. On this plugin’s page, these people sometimes attempt to post spam to try and make it seem as if reCAPTCHA is not working. A combination of reCAPTCHA and Akismet might help to solve this problem, and if spam still gets through for this reason, it would be very minimal and easy to manually take care of.

Why am I getting Warning: pack() [function.pack]: Type H: illegal hex digit?

You have the keys in the wrong place. Remember, the reCAPTCHA keys are different from the MailHide keys. And the Public keys are different from the Private keys as well. You can’t mix them around. Go through your keys and make sure you have them each in the correct box.

Aren’t you increasing the time users spend solving CAPTCHAs by requiring them to type two words instead of one?

Actually, no. Most CAPTCHAs on the Web ask users to enter strings of random characters, which are slower to type than English words. reCAPTCHA requires no more time to solve than most other CAPTCHAs.

Are reCAPTCHAs less secure than other CAPTCHAs that use random characters instead of words?

Because we ask users to enter two words instead of one, we can increase the security of reCAPTCHA against programs that attempt to guess the words using a dictionary. Whenever an IP address fails one reCAPTCHA, we can show them more distorted words, and give them challenges for which we know both words. The probability of randomly guessing both words correctly would be less than one in ten million.

Are CAPTCHAs secure? I heard spammers are using porn sites to solve them: the CAPTCHAs are sent to a porn site, and the porn site users are asked to solve the CAPTCHA before being able to see a pornographic image.

CAPTCHAs offer great protection against abuse from automated programs. While it might be the case that some spammers have started using porn sites to attack CAPTCHAs (although there is no recorded evidence of this), the amount of damage this can inflict is tiny (so tiny that we haven’t even seen this happen!). Whereas it is trivial to write a bot that abuses an unprotected site millions of times a day, redirecting CAPTCHAs to be solved by humans viewing pornography would only allow spammers to abuse systems a few thousand times per day. The economics of this attack just don’t add up: every time a porn site shows a CAPTCHA before a porn image, they risk losing a customer to another site that doesn’t do this.

= Version 4.0
* Upgrade to reCAPTCHA V2.
* Increase supported languages to 40+.
= Version 3.2
* Transferred ownership back to Google

Version 3.1.6

• WordPress MS fixes. Should now work out of the box at the individual blog level. Thanks to huyz
• NOTICE: If anyone is interested in taking up development of this plugin, please contact me at [email protected].

Version 3.1.5

• Thanks to Ken Newman for these changes
• Update author website
• Stop generating javascript errors on unnecessary pages
• Better SSL support

Version 3.1.4

• Fixed an XSS vulnerability

Version 3.1.3

• Added a collision aversion prefix to the Plugin class. bbouton from github alerted me to a collision between WP-reCAPTCHA’s plugin class and the JW Player Plugin’s Plugin class.

Version 3.1.2

• Fixed option migration. The plugin was actually written to be made to import the old options, but the hook that functionality was registered to does not fire when the wordpress interface updates a plugin, only when a plugin is updated manually. Now the plugin will import or register default options as long as the options don’t already exist.
• Fixed a case where recaptcha theme would not change. This happened because of the above problem, creating a situation in which the tab index field could be empty, and being empty this then caused a problem with the recaptcha options when they were output to the page. If you’re running version 3.0 of the plugin, go ahead and add a number to the tab index (e.g. 5 for comments, 30 for registration), if not, this plugin should automatically fix it next time you change save the settings.
• Modified the options page submit buttons to more explicitly show that they are specific to their own respective sections, that is, one button ONLY saves the changes for one reCAPTCHA, and the other ONLY saves the changes for MailHide.

Version 3.0

• Rewrote the entire plugin in an object-oriented manner with separation of concerns in mind to increase maintainability and extensibility
• Implemented the ability to import the options from the option set of older versions of the plugin, such as 2.9.8.2 and less
• Redesigned the options page for the plugin, now using newer wordpress options/form functionality with support for input-validation
• Options for recaptcha and mailhide are independent of each other
• Added support for localization, using gettext
• Fixed the issue where comments would not be saved if the reCAPTCHA was entered incorrectly (or not entered at all). requires javascript
• Fixed an issue where saved comments (from bad reCAPTCHA response) would replace double quotes with backslashes
• Fixed an issue in wordpress 3 and above in which mailhide would not work due to interference with a new filter, make_clickable, which auto-links emails and URLs
• Fixed a role-check issue in wordpress 3 and above. level_10 (and all levels for that matter) have been deprecated. now using activate_plugins instead.

Version 2.9.8.2

• Fixed a bug with WordPress 3.0 Multi-Site

Version 2.9.8

• Added support for WordPress 3.0 Multi-Site thanks to Tom Lynch

Version 2.9.7

• Fixed a relatively new critical bug which marked new comments as spam regardless of reCAPTCHA response

Version 2.9.6

• Fixed a careless bug affecting custom hidden emails
• Fixed broken links in readme.txt

Version 2.9.5

• Added flexibility to the enabling of MailHide. Can now separately choose to enable/disable MailHide for posts/pages, comments, RSS feed of posts/pages, and RSS feed of comments
• Fixed an ‘endless redirection’ bug thanks to Edilton Siqueira
• Fixed a bug in WPMU where wp-admin/user-new.php kept trying to validate the user registration with reCAPTCHA information despite not having shown the reCAPTCHA form, thanks to Daniel Collis-Puro for letting me know
• Added a line break after the reCAPTCHA form to add some padding space between it and the submit button. Due to popular demand
• Fixed a validation problem where a style attribute was missing. Thanks to nv1962
• Public and Private keys are now trimmed since they are usually pasted from the recaptcha site, to avoid any careless errors
• Fixed the regular expressions for matching the emails, [email protected] type emails now work

Version 2.9.4

• Fixed a bug where the comment would not be saved if the CAPTCHA wasn’t entered correctly. Thanks to Justin Heideman.

Version 2.9.3

• Fixed the recaptcha_wp_saved_comment function. Thanks to Tomi M.

Version 2.9.2

• ‘Beautified’ the options page.
• Added two options to allow users to enter their own custom error messages. Also good for foreign language support.
• Fixed a conflict bug with the OpenID plugin where the reCAPTCHA form would show under the OpenID section in the registration form.
• Added two new options which allow one to choose the text to be shown for all hidden Emails and/or the title of the link.
• Fixed a ‘Could not open socket’ error in recaptchalib.php. Bug ID 26
• Fixed a WPMU issue where blog registrations weren’t possible due to a redirection to the first step in the registration process. Thanks to Edward.

Version 2.9.1

• Forgot that if you can see emails in their true form, then you shouldn’t have to see the [nohide][/nohide] tags either. Fixed.

Version 2.8.6

• Administration interface is now integrated with 2.5’s look and feel. Thanks to Jeremy Clarke.
• Users can now have more control over who sees the reCAPTCHA form and who can see emails in their true form (If MailHide is enabled). Thanks to Jeremy Clarke.
• Fixed a very stupid (One character deal) fatal error on most Windows Servers which don’t support short tags (short_open_tag). I’m speaking of the so called ‘Unexpected $end’ error.
• Accommodated for the fact that in +2.6 the wp-content folder can be anywhere.