Recently there has been an increase of comment spam on TeqEdge blog. As much as I would love to have an increase in comment activity spamming is causing lot of headaches. A default WordPress install comes with Akismet plugin which gives basic spam protection. Akismet is a great plugin and a great way to safeguard your new blog. But when you receive more than 30 comment spam a day it is time to look for a more advanced solution. I was looking a few different captcha products to find the best fit for TeqEdge blog. reCaptcha for came out on top. reCaptcha is an excellent add-on for WordPress to easily implement captcha deterring comment spam.

What Is reCaptcha

Captcha is a distorted block of text that humans can easily read but bots fails to understand. If you have visited a few websites you probably have seen some form of captcha. They are currently being used in a lot of places – from new email account registrations to commenting on blogs. reCaptcha goes one step further. It uses the captcha outputs to digitize books that cannot be read with traditional OCR (ed. Optical Character Recognition). reCaptcha describes the process as “reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.”

How To Install reCAPTCHA

The installation procedure described on their website is straight forward and very easy to follow. It reacts as just another plugin for WordPress. Download the plugin in zip format to your computer and unzip. Then upload and and activate to your blog. During activation you will be asked to enter a Public and Private API keys. Don’t worry – just sign up for a free account and enter your website URL. Done! For more detailed installation instructions refer to the official reCAPTCHA plugin page.

During my install process I did not experience any problems. It took 5 minutes from downloading to activating the reCaptcha plugin. Once fully activated it reCaptcha will appear directly below the comment area. I included the screenshot below how it looks.