Captcha revisited and Google reCAPTCHA for your WordPress website with WPForms

Last Updated on January 20, 2021 by Editor

For those who have just started learning more about computers, it is imperative to question the coming up of annoying captchas while submitting forms or comments once on the World Wide Web.

‘A CAPTCHA (/kæp.tʃə/, an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.’

The reason is forms or comments are meant for genuine users, not for so-called spammers using automated bots or programs for submitting unsolicited details about products or links that transfer to external websites for the sake of forced marketing.

In the case of news portals, imagine how embarrassing the things become when someone adds details about health products where comments are supposed to be posted regarding a political issue. For the owners of the news portal, this means credibility of their site goes down.

**12 Vital Tips and Tools to Combat Comment Spam in WordPress**

Since it is costly to monitor each and every comment by humans, captchas are introduced to check such malicious activities as a line of defense. Deploying captchas reduces the number of so-called spam messages. Also, adding a large number of unsolicited contents as part of forms/comments will add to the memory space of hosting, thereby reducing the load time or in an extreme case, getting the website crashed.

While the spammers try to find ways to bypass captchas by introducing smarter software programs that can detect say curly texts/letters or images of objects, ultimately the good side of this is improvement in AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology. For instance, such capability to detect curly texts/letters can be applied in a software program under Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and detection of images as part of improved Image Recognition Software (IRS).

So, you get access to an improved OCR software that will help convert a page of content written by human hands into text contents in MS Word/PDF. Or an improved IRS Software that can detect image files thereby combating plagiarism when it comes to use of unauthorized photos.

**Making use of OCR and IRS, software by ABBYY captures content from document images and photos via tablets and smartphones.**

Since captchas are hurdles for users, an attempt is always there to make captchas easier while still not allowing spammers to bypass. For instance, reCAPTCHA by Google.