What is Captcha? Updated on August 16, 2021 by Carrie Smaha 1 Minutes, 20 Seconds to Read Most users are familiar with captcha, as it is in use all over the web. Captcha is a way to prevent “bots” from posing as a real human and posting content to your websites, such as posting spam comments. Captcha requires users to look at a picture and type in the words that appear. This makes it difficult for bots to post content to your website because they are not sophisticated enough to read the letters in the image. (an example of captcha in use) reCaptcha – a type of captcha reCaptcha is a free captcha service that protects your website against spam along with other forms of malicious attacks where bots act as if they were real humans. reCaptcha is a widget that you can add to your website to ensure that your visitors signing up are actually human. Captcha is desgined to tell humans and computers apart by asking you to correctly spell words on the screen that computers cannot decipher. reCaptcha is a little bit different in that, it uses these bits of deciphering to digitize old books. So, not only are you protecting your website, you’re helping to make digital copies of old books as well. For more information on reCaptcha see here. There are many different plugins available for PHP, WordPress, FormMail, phpBB, and perl to just name a few. For installation instructions please refer to the links below: Perl reCaptcha Plugin WordPress Captcha Plugin PHP reCaptcha Plugin reCaptcha for FormMail phpBB reCaptcha Plugin JAVA/ JSP reCaptcha Plugin Other Platforms If you need further assistance, please feel free to contact the support department. Share this Article Carrie Smaha Senior Manager Marketing Operations Carrie Smaha is a Senior Marketing Operations leader with over 20 years of experience in digital strategy, web development, and IT project management. She specializes in go-to-market programs and SaaS solutions for WordPress and VPS Hosting, working closely with technical teams and customers to deliver high-performance, scalable platforms. At InMotion Hosting, she drives product marketing initiatives that blend strategic insight with technical depth. More Articles by Carrie Related Articles How to Create a Local Dev Server with Vagrant AWStats: View Statistics About Your Website Traffic MySQL Error 1064: You Have an Error in Your SQL Syntax MySQL Error 1044 Access Denied Troubleshooting: Fixing the “localhost Refused to Connect” Error HTTP Error Codes: What They Mean and How to Fix Them How to Fix the 504 Gateway Timeout Error 500 Internal Server Error How To Create a PHP Redirect (301, 302, and Dynamic Redirect Examples) Connect to SFTP for Shared Hosting Accounts Using FileZilla
