Read the SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH by the University of Wollongong, Australia. Spoiler: the results are around page 20.
You've been there, you have installed 20 or more CAPTCHA plugins for WordPress to see them ultimately fail in even slowing down spam bots. We know, we have been there too. I used to run a a very high-profile BuddyPress community website that lost its moderators and administrators because of the web-spam issue. We tried everything, Aksmet, ReCaptcha, and nothing seemed to work. This is because spam bots are reading images with OCR technology. With only 3 minutes of setup on your site, their accuracy at solving your CAPTCHAs are a stunning 92%. This made me think outside the box and answer my own question: What can I do to make it virtually impossible for a computer to know what a human would know.
This lead to the first-ever text-based 3-D CAPTCHA and it was born right here on WordPress.org. The technology is so incredibly simple it is mind-blowing -- render a transparent image of text and lay lines on top of it. Sounds too easy right? It is for a human. You can see this image and can immediately see what's missing. A computer however would have to employ reasoning engines to determine what is missing. Our CAPTCHA has been broken by OCR bots programmed specifically for the easiest setting, but only at a 27% success rate. Most other plugins you will find on WordPress.org has a 70-99% success rate!
The same university study that broke our captcha admitted, ramping up the settings will make it ' UNBREAKABLE '. While everyone is trying to complicate their CAPTCHAs with images, flash puzzles, and coloring it like a 2 year old with eight-inch markers, we decided to make an image provoke deduction skills.
This plugin no longer offers the CAPTCHA programming itself and the core image generation is hosted by Goldsboro Web Development and you are granted FREE API access through via MyGWD Spam Database. This means you are not required to have GD or Freetype installed. This was a decision made to ensure compatibility and to maintain rights to the future development of the platform. By passing the CAPTCHA code to our server, allowing us to process it and display the CAPTCHA in an iFrame on your site, we are able to ensure that 100% of WordPress administrators with up-to-date servers are able to use this stunning CAPTCHA. Also, we are able to grab, monitor, and detect when bots are attacking, find their routines and even stop them from using your precious bandwidth.
The service provided by Goldsboro Web Development is free and no API key or code is ever required. At any time you can upgrade to Pro, in which you will be issued a license key. The price we charge for Pro is just enough to cover our basic costs, $1.99/mo (basically you're buying us a coffee). Your price does not increase due to volume.
We didn't aim to just band-aid the spam issue, we aspire to permanently fix it. To know what I mean, you really have to download the plugin and see for yourself all the features we added to make securing your site and reporting spamers as easy as possible! Here is a teaser, we automatically query the abuse email for a spamming IP and pre-populate an Abuse Report email so all you have to do is hit "Send".
This plugin is revolutionary in the sense that it employs the most simple technique to solve a very complex problem. Deduction. You do it every day, and don't even realize it. Every time you feel for your keys in your pocket, or swerve to avoid a pot-hole, you have employed deduction to realize something is missing. This is a human only feature that isn't available to any other animal or computer. By laying lines over a transparent word, a human can easily see the word by deducing from what is missing. A computer simply looks for edges, and all they find is lines!
Super Captcha uses cloud processing by working in cooperation with your website to identify, stop, and ban spammers. The best way to flag a spammer is repeated failure of a CAPTCHA, but we understand humans make mistakes too, so we don't kick off a ban from one or even 5 failures. A spam bot however will visit multiple Super Captcha enabled websites and will try and spam each one. Users that fail the captcha on multiple websites, are indeed banned. When your site helps us pop a spammer, 10 others do the same. Over the past year, we have identified over 11,000,000 spam bots! We have also determined some other interesting data, such as more than 70% of these bots are from China, 10% from Russia, and 10% from the USA.
Why are we doing this? I've seen some really awesome WordPress communities out there and am a WordPress fan myself, but what gets me cracking on this code in the mornings is the memory of some of these awesome sites closing down because a spam bot was paid to run over this site, blasting their links every where so the page owner could gain 0.0001% in page ranking, leaving the admin with hours of work cleaning up after the bot. Many admins just give up hope and shut the site down - I did once, but I hope this never has to happen again because of a spam bot!
This CAPTCHA is pre-programmed for the following forms:
- WordPress Login
- WordPress Registration
- Buddypress Login
- Buddypress Registration
- Comment Forms
- WordPress MU Blog Creation form
- BuddyPress Blog Creation Form
LEGAL: GWD Privacy Policy | GWD Terms of Service | GWD Acceptable Use Policy
SERVER REQUIREMENTS:
- PHP v5.3.0 or greater (Highly recommended)
- WordPress 4.0 or greater (Previous versions untested)