Alternatives to reCAPTCHA?

[clamor]

Hi Everyone

 

There have been lively discussions about this issue in the past but not for some time so I am starting a new topic. The  reCAPTCHA option for anti-spamming applies to all forms including the checkout and this is difficult for customers. The text is extremely hard to read and puts people off. As I tried to log-in to raise this issue my password was not recognised and when I used the lost password option I encountered a  reCAPTCHA form. Four attempts to enter the  reCAPTCHA text later I managed to complete the task. I was aware of the option to reset the text but this is not intuitive for many people. I want to remove the  reCAPTCHA from the checkout and leave it in place for other forms. Has anyone figured out how to do this? Alternatively, I would prefer to turn off  reCAPTCHA and add a checkbox ('Are you human? - Yes or No) on every form including the checkout. Does anyone have any script for setting this up? I have found the contact form but where are all the other forms located? I am not a script writer or IT expert so please be kind if responding to this post. I noticed there is a plug-in available but the reviews vary so I would like to try to get around this myself if possible.

 

All the best for the holiday season and Happy New Year!

[Al Brookbanks]

Hello Clamor, I agree that it is too difficult. What you want to do is possible with a little custom coding but I'm not sure quite how involved it is. 

 

We have looked for an alternative captcha for sometime but haven't managed to find a viable alternative. 

[clamor]

Thanks for responding so quickly. I have turned  reCAPTCHA off for the time being to see if it makes a difference. Unfortunately my customers are not necessarily computer literate. There are some nice visual captcha options around but they all seem to be developed for Wordpress.  

[clamor]

_{Hi Again}

 

_{I switched off reCAPTCHA yesterday and there has only been one spam email via the website so far. As I understand it, the purpose of reCAPTCHA is to prevent or minimise spamming via robots accessing website forms. So, having given this issue more thought, I decided I need another way to protect the website forms. The two forms that need to be protected are the contact form and the registration form. There does not appear to be any way to access the newsletter registration form but this one is probably not as important. I don't think I need to protect the checkout from robots because, as another member pointed out some time ago, robots do not have credit cards or PayPal accounts. So, it occurred to me that robots.txt may be a solution. I already have a robots.txt file in the public domain area of the website that excludes the cgi-bin and images folder. Initially, I thought I would simply update the file to disallow the URLs for each of the form pages however this will apparently alert potential hackers that the pages exist. Another alternative is to place robots text on the actual form pages in the header as follows: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. This tells the robots not to index or follow the links on the page. I have entered this robots text in the Contact Form source code (although I could not access the header section so it is in the body section). Where can I find the register.html page? Is this the same as the content.register.php form under skins/skin name/templates?}

 

_{I hope this helps other members if I am on the right track with this approach. I would appreciate any feedback and thanks in advance for your help}

[bsmither]

I have no solution, but only wish to clarify something that you may have a misunderstanding on:

 

Miscreants (typically) use automated scripts to submit forms. One may call these automated scripts "bots".

 

Search engines also use automated scripts to scan and ultimately index your site. One may call these scripts "robots".

 

The 'robots.txt' file is to control the robots by suggesting what is in-bounds and what is out-of-bounds. (As if you do not want some or all of your site indexed in Google and other search engines.)

 

The captcha system is to thwart the bots by detecting less than human behavior in the response. Hopefully.

[clamor]

Thanks for clarifying the terms. I did think bots was short for robots. Well, My solution probably won't work but it may help if the robots are not indexing the form pages. For the moment I am going to try to put up with the spam.