First of all, let's clarify the terms ...
The first logical question: what is CAPTCHA?
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It was developed to manage and prevent the ever-increasing amount of automated spam across the web.
The core principle was extremely simple: it showed users an image containing some text, and users were asked to correctly type the text to prove that they are human ... Something like this:
No wonder, this relatively simple and efficient method has become a very popular anti-spam solution ...
However, in the recent years significant developments were made in the field of artificial intelligence technology, and nowadays are countless computer programs that can easily solve a CAPTCHA ... With a 99% accuracy ...
In other words, the good old CAPTCHA isn't really effective anymore ...
That's the bad news ...
The good news: not so long ago Google created a new API for their reCAPTCHA technology. It's called NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA and instead of showing users text, this method simply asks users to click a box to prove they are human:
First of all, it's more user friendly, because it's quicker, easier to use and significantly less annoying ...
More than that, it can't be "deceived" by computer programs, because if the NoCAPTCHA intelligence engine feels that a user might be a spam bot, then it will display further challenges ...
And it goes without saying, this awesome new technology is 100% Wordpress-compatible ...
So, I've decided to create this short tutorial where I will show you how easy is to efficiently block comment spam in Wordpress with NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA ...
Interested?
Let's do this ...