If you own a website or manage a website, then you are definitely familiar with spammers. Every day you see lots of spam comments and you have to clean them one-by-one. Doing this takes a lot of time and is very boring. However, if your website is developed on WordPress, you don’t need to do it on your own.
There are some excellent plugins available which can help you to fight these spammers and reduce your workload. I am talking about WordPress CAPTCHA plugins.
What is CAPTCHA?
If you are completely new to CAPTCHA, let me give you a quick introduction first. The word CAPTCHA is actually an acronym. The full form is ‘Completely Automated Public Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’.
As you can guess from the full meaning, CAPTCHA is used to identify whether a specific action is performed by an actual human being or an automated bot. To do this, CAPTCHA programs use different types of techniques including rearranging pictures, typing long, distorted text, solving arithmetic problems, etc.
The tests are built in such a way that only actual human beings can identify and solve the problems. The most interesting part is all of this detection process is done automatically. You don’t have to sit in front of your computer and approve each result. The whole process is automated.
Introducing CAPTCHA by BestWebSoft
Well, I think now you have got a basic understanding of what CAPTCHA is. Now, let’s see how you can use this clever system to make your website spam-free. I will use CAPTCHA by BestWebSoft for this purpose.
Download and install CAPTCHA by BestWebSoft in your WordPress site. Once you activate the plugin, it will create a new menu item titled ‘BWS Plugins’ in your website dashboard.
Setting up the Plugin
Go to BWS Plugins > CAPTCHA to start the configuration process. You will be taken to a page like the following –
At the top, you will find several checkboxes to enable CAPTCHA for the login, registration, password reset and comments form. You can also choose to hide the CAPTCHA in comments from for the registered users.
Below, you will find some more options to customize the CAPTCHA.
First of all, you can provide a title for the WordPress CAPTCHA plugin. Then, you will find a field for specifying the required symbol. Then, there are two separate fields for customizing the error messages if the CAPTCHA field is empty or if the provided CAPTCHA is incorrect.
Then, in the ‘Arithmetic actions for CAPTCHA’ section, you can choose which arithmetic operations to include in the CAPTCHA. Available options include Plus, Minus and Multiplication.
In the ‘CAPTCHA complexity level’ section, you can choose to include Numbers and/or Words in the CAPTCHA.
After making all the changes, click ‘Save Changes’. If you reload your website now, you will be able to view the CAPTCHA in its place.
There is also a pro version of the plugin. By purchasing the pro version for $19.99 per year, you will get additional advantages like enabling CAPTCHA for BuddyPress registration, comments or group creation forms. The pro version also allows you to enable CAPTCHA for forms created by Contact Form 7.
Final Words
As you can imagine, using a CAPTCHA plugin can save you from a lot of hassle. And CAPTCHA by BestWebSoft is a solid CAPTCHA plugin. While I have tried to cover all the basics of using the plugin, please let me know if you have any questions.
If you are using any other CAPTCHA plugin in your WordPress website, don’t forget to share the plugin name and your experience with us.