Using CAPTCHA (reCAPTCHA) on Your Sites

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Overview

CAPTCHAs, "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart," are website elements that differentiate humans from computers. These CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans to answer, but difficult for computers.

Spammers use computers to automatically generate large numbers of submissions, spamming websites or even bringing them offline. CAPTCHAs provide a defense mechanism against these automated submissions.

The following guide provides information on utilizing reCAPTCHA provided by Google.

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Implementing reCAPTCHA

Google offers reCAPTCHA as a free service, available at: https://www.google.com/recaptcha

There are three basic steps to implementing reCaptcha:

  • Registering a site
  • Client-side integration
  • Server-side integration

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Step 1: Registering a site

On the reCAPTCHA website:

  1. Choose Get reCAPTCHA.
  2. Enter the domain for your websites under Domains.
  3. Enter your contact email addresses under Owners.
  4. Click Register to continue.

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Step 2: Client-side Integration

After you've registered your site, you'll be taken to a management page that lists the site key and secret key. This page will also list the HTML snippets you will need to paste into your site.

Save this information.

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Step 3: Server-side Integration

After integrating the client-side of reCAPTCHA, you will also need to implement the server-side implementation. This portion is more technical than the client-side integration, and implementation requires coding knowledge.

For more information, see the reCAPTCHA documentation: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/verify (link)

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Details

Article ID: 1442
Created
Mon 4/24/23 1:08 PM
Modified
Tue 7/18/23 3:28 PM