Alright after a few suggestions, I have fixed up the plugin. I’ve added options to enable SSL, be compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict, the ability to change the theme for the registration form recaptcha, and the ability to not show the recaptcha on comment posts (In case you only want it to show on the registration form and only allow registered users to comment). I’ve also fixed a few bugs. I’ve also kind of redesigned the options page, only a little. I’ve separated some options so that users have an easier time understanding the context of all of them. Here is what it looks like now:
You can download the reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin version 2.8 Release Candidate 2 here.
After some time I think I have finally finished version 2.8 of the reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin. Back in January I believe I was contacted by Ben Maurer who works on reCAPTCHA asking me to work on the official reCAPTCHA plugin for WordPress. He asked me this after seeing that I wrote the WP-MailHide plugin. Well I took forever but I finally think I’ve finished. I might have one or two things to add but they should be minimal. I am just posting this here so that people see it and hopefully try it out and tell me what they think.
If you don’t know what reCAPTCHA is, you can read about it here. It is a really genius concept and I encourage you to read it. Basically these guys put meaning into CAPTCHAs. Instead of just randomly generating letters and numbers, they take words that Industry Standard OCR Scanners can’t read and construct the CAPTCHAs with them. One of the words they do know and one they don’t. After a certain complex condition is met (For example after a certain percentage of the people put the same spelling for the same word) the correct spelling is then given to the OCR scanners so that they could finish digitizing the books that they are scanning. So basically this means it is fundamentally (Whatever the opposite of flawed is) … epic? Spam bots that can bypass CAPTCHAs use OCR libraries. If industry level OCR scanners couldn’t read the word, I’m pretty sure these home-made OCR spam bots can’t either. Also, it removes the pain and frustration of having to fill in CAPTCHAs because you know that every word you type is going to a good cause.
Anyways, like I said it took me a while but I think I’m nearly finished if not finished already. The changes that have been made and things that have been fixed can be seen here. I have added a slew of features and options which aren’t meant to confuse the user but hopefully give them more freedom as to how to protect their blog from spammers. Among the many features I’ve implemented, a few are:
- Integrated MailHide into the Plugin. This scans each post that’s about to be viewed for emails and hides them using the MailHide method. More information on the wonderful MailHide technology can be found here. MailHide makes use of the mcrypt PHP module. If the module isn’t loaded, an alert will be displayed and it won’t be enabled.
- Stylesheet for all reCAPTCHA related things ranging from hidden emails, administration options, etc.
- XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant (Or so I believe, according to the validator. If you see otherwise please tell me)
- Ability to turn off reCAPTCHA and/or MailHide for Admins
- Ability to choose from different Languages and Themes
- New improved regular expressions for matching of all types of email addresses (For MailHide)
- Special nohide tags (BBCode Format, with []’s surrounding them) will allow one to bypass MailHide if they really want to directly show an email.
- Ability to add reCAPTCHA to the registration form.
- Fixed Akismet conflicts. Now, according to my tests, failed reCAPTCHA’s won’t equate to spam and therefor won’t be added to the Akismet Spam queue (No more ‘why am I still getting spam?’ questions).
Here are a few examples demonstrating MailHide:
test...@haha.com
This is a hyperlink with a plaintext email in the href
This is a hyperlink with a mailto: email in the href
The following are the same emails but won’t be hidden thanks to the nohide tags:
testing@haha.com
This is a hyperlink with a plaintext email in the href
This is a hyperlink with a mailto: email in the href
I would definitely like you guys to try it out and let me know what you think. Following are some screenshots, the download link is at the bottom:
Download the Official reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin 2.8 Release Candidate 1 Plugin here.
I recently got an email from one of the reCAPTCHA engineers asking if I could help them out with the WordPress plugin, and since I love both WordPress and reCAPTCHA, I couldn’t refuse. I spent the day working on integrating WP-MailHide into the official WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin. The email I got mentioned many nice ideas for the plugin and I will continue to try and implement them.
So far I have added a few options. It’s possible to turn it on or off, requires both API keys (MailHide API keys are different from reCAPTCHA API keys), has customizable CSS styling, as well as a customizable regular expression.
Take a look at the administration options for yourself. This site is now using the integrated plugin instead of just WP-MailHide.
There are so many pastebins on the Internet these days. Why does the world need another one? I don’t know, but I wanted one for myself because of my friends and I when we were in Computer Science. Others found the pastebin so I then made password protected pastes. I like how the Pastebin is now. The only problems I have with it are that in FireFox when you copy and paste from it it also includes some weird numbers, so you have to copy and paste from the code box which isn’t that bad. Also I was trying to implement a printer friendly feature but I’m too sick of working on it so I gave up after I realized that with it people were able to circumvent password protection, I know there’s a way to fix that but I’m just too tired. Continue Reading
