Fighting against form spam is always a necessary job for any website owners as it is so annoying to see the submission full of immaterial information.

If you are finding for a solution, Google Captcha will be the right answer. This article is about to answer what Captcha, reCaptcha, securimage is and how to make it work effectively.

The most common type of Captcha was originally invented in 1997. This form requires users to type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits. It  is commonly used as a solution against bots by preventing comment spam and stopping fake registrations. However, it is undeniable that Captcha can be time-consuming and challenging at times.  

ReCaptcha saves the same function as Captcha and it supports two versions. The first offers you to enter some words or digits from the image, and the second needs you to mark the checkbox “I’m not a robot” only.

According to the reCaptcha website, over 200 million Captchas are solved by human every day; if the average time spent doing a Captcha is 10 seconds then that amounts to 150,000 hours a day.

Lastly, securimage is an open-source free PHP Captcha script for generating complex images and Captcha codes. It requires you to download securimage and use some technical knowledge about coding.

It is needless to say that Captcha methods are indispensable for  protecting your form from spam software robots and abuse. However, it could be difficult for newbie to install and integrate it to your form. But with Uniform, using Captcha has never been such easy.

Use Captcha in Uniform

The reason Uniform chooses reCaptcha and securimage instead of Captcha lies in the security. Captchas are vulnerable to hacks either by removing background clutter and noise or by identifying the character in each region. When spammers tested the same techniques against images created using reCaptcha and securimage – they failed completely.

How to add Captcha to form?

When you go to the first page to create a form, in General, you will see Captcha area:

What you need to do is just to choose the most suitable Captcha method for your form: No Captcha, Recaptcha or Securimage.

Note: If you choose reCaptcha, several steps need to be done.

The system will require you to enable reCaptcha. Just click on Here and then another click to enable Captcha - ReCaptcha.

That’s for the first version of reCaptcha.

In case you want to add “I’m not a robot”, you need to fill your reCaptcha key in Captcha - ReCaptcha: the site API key & the site secret API key.

The API key pair is unique to each domain and first - level subdomains that you specify. These are free to get from Google if you have a Google account already.

Visit reCaptcha official website to get your own reCaptcha API keys: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin.

Fill the required information and you will receive your site API key & site secret API key. Paste them to reCaptcha section, click Save and you are now free to choose No Captcha reCaptcha.

If you have any questions about setting up your form with Joomla or Uniform, don't hesitate to leave a comment or post a question in our forum.