Better Captcha – a new WordPress plugin

I did say a few months ago that I was working on a paid plugin called Better Security Pro, and that’s still true, it’s still in the works.  It’s become a much bigger project than I initially thought as I keep having more and more ideas, but I hope that it’s going to be ready for public release later this year.

In the mean time, I’ve just released a new plugin called Better Captcha.  This is another security plugin, this time one that adds captcha’s to be solved on the WordPress core forms, including login, register, lost password and comment forms.

The main difference with this plugin over the many others, is that it doesn’t use Google’s reCaptcha, which is incredibly popular.  Unfortunately there are some issues with it not working in all countries, and more importantly, they’ve recently indicated that they plan to charge for the service moving forwards.  There’s clarity yet over how this might be implementing, such as whether a free tier will exist or not, but at the end of the day this is Google, and if you’re not paying for it then you’re the product, right?

In comes hCaptcha

Private. Secure. Faster. And we pay you to use it.

Now to be clear, when they say that they pay, they pay in their own cryptocurrency called HMT, but they might be useful one day 🙂

For me, it’s just a nice alternative that I wanted to use myself.  There is an official hCaptcha plugin but at the time of choosing to create the plugin, it hadn’t been updated in a long time.  At the time of writing this it looks like they have updated it more recently, but it did take a few weeks to get published in the end.

Anyway, the way they have implemented some of the hooks wasn’t ideal in my opinion, so I’m still happy that I’ve created it, and moving forwards I hope to add a lot more functionality to make it integrate nicely with the service through their API.

The service itself is super easy and free to set up to get the key and secret required to integrate with the service.  You can create multiple different sites within the service and create individual key and secret pairs for each, making it easy to deploy safely across multiple sites and get an overview of how each is performing.

This plugin now joins the increasing list of plugins that I have developed and put on the WordPress plugin repository – I hope you find it useful.