Hi,

This extension changes the captchas from graphic words to definable questions and answers. The settings allow you to create up to 8 simple questions and answers that will be randomly chosen in place of the captcha. So, for example, you could have:

Question: What is missing: North, South, East?
Answer: West

Question: 2+2 is equal to?
Answer: 4

Question: An ... a day keeps the doctor away. What word is missing?
Answer: apple

The captcha will then be replaced by one of these questions. The answer is case insensitive so for question 1 ‘West’ and ‘west’ will validate.

There is an additional setting: Answer hinting, that places text showing the number of characters required to complete the answer after the question. The hint will be wrapped in a span with the class ‘captcha-hints’ like so:

Note that no other HTML tags are output so you can use whatever you wish to wrap and style the captcha question. The input is cleaned and processed by the existing form code.

Werner Gusset has kindly provided a German language file for this extension. You can download it from his site.

I hope that you find this useful. Let me know what you think of it and whether you think it could be improved.

The latest version can now be found on our site here.

Cheers

Dry

P.S. You will probably want to edit the lang.core.php file to change the error messages associated with either no captcha submitted or an incorrect one. The keys are ‘captcha_required’ and ‘captcha_incorrect’ on about lines 98 and 101 respectively.

oh my goodness.  This sound rockin’, will have to play with it this weekend. =)

Please add this to the add-on library. =)

Wow, Dry… this is fantastic.  I’ve been wanting something like this ever since I saw a similar plugin for WordPress.  Now I have something to play with tonight.

Thanks!

Cool, have never liked the EE captcha system.

Thanks Dry

works perfect and I was looking a long time for such a solution.

One little thing: Could you put the hint text for “character(s) required” in the language file? On german sites we would like to have this be translated.

Hi Werner,

Glad you like it. I’ll make that change and update the download later on today.

Cheers

Dry

Hey Dry.

I’m not sure if this is doable with extensions as I’m wholly unfamiliar with how they work, but I was wondering if it would be possible to dynamically add more than 5 Q&A;pairs.  I guess I’m just worried that if, after a while, the same questions keep repeating all the bots will catch on eventually.

Am I being overly paranoid?

Looks like you should just be able to add new “questionX” & “answerX” keys to the lang file, and the same to the settings array within the ext file.

CrimsonDawn - 04 July 2007 04:21 AM

Hey Dry.

I’m not sure if this is doable with extensions as I’m wholly unfamiliar with how they work, but I was wondering if it would be possible to dynamically add more than 5 Q&A;pairs.  I guess I’m just worried that if, after a while, the same questions keep repeating all the bots will catch on eventually.

Am I being overly paranoid?

Hi Crimson,

I am not sure that is easily doable. I can certainly add more Q&A;fields and you don’t have to fill them all in for the extension work correctly.

Of course, it’s easy to change the questions on an infrequent basis and that is going to be completely transparent to your site users.

Cheers

Dry

Drylouvre - 03 July 2007 04:09 PM

There is an additional setting: Answer hinting, that places text showing the number of characters required to complete the answer after the question. The hint will be wrapped in a span with the class ‘captcha-hints’ like so:

What is missing: North, South, East? <span class="captcha-hints">4 character(s) required</span>

Dry

Another little suggestion: could you wrap the hint in brackets () like

otherwise we would need to add them in the extension file by hand

Thanks

Hi,

I’ve updated the extension to version 1.0.1. This moves the answer hint text into the language file and also adds 3 more Q&A;sets giving a total of eight.

The file in the first post is the new download.

Cheers

Dry

Werner Gusset - 04 July 2007 12:07 PM

Drylouvre - 03 July 2007 04:09 PM

There is an additional setting: Answer hinting, that places text showing the number of characters required to complete the answer after the question. The hint will be wrapped in a span with the class ‘captcha-hints’ like so:

What is missing: North, South, East? <span class="captcha-hints">4 character(s) required</span>

Dry

Another little suggestion: could you wrap the hint in brackets () like

What is missing: North, South, East? <span class="captcha-hints">(4 character(s) required)</span>

otherwise we would need to add them in the extension file by hand

Thanks

Oops,

Sorry Werner I didn’t see your additional request. You know, I wondered about adding that the first time around but figured that it would be better to leave it as clean as possible.

Lemme see if I can come up with something in the settings to let you choose whether to have them or not.

Cheers

Dry

Hi,

Updated to version 1.0.2. Changes are:

1. Added new setting to enable hints wrapped in ( and )
2. Slightly amended English language hints text

File in first post is new download.

Cheers

Dry

Dry

That’s very good. I love this ext. Many thanks.

A new suggestion: what about an option to put the Hint on a new line? Would be handy sometime. And if you do this, give it a seperate CSS class. This way one could have the question bold and the hint normal.

If you want you can have the little lang file in German to include.

Hi Werner,

Yeah, that’d be great. Send it over and I’ll update zip. Or, if you’d prefer just send me the link to your site download and I’ll update the first post.

Werner Gusset - 04 July 2007 11:52 PM

Dry

A new suggestion: what about an option to put the Hint on a new line? Would be handy sometime. And if you do this, give it a seperate CSS class. This way one could have the question bold and the hint normal.

You can already do this because the hints appear at the end of the question. All you have to do is make the hint span a block level element (in CSS) and style whatever tag you’ve wrapped around the captcha appropriately. In fact, I’ve done something like this:

Template

CSS

Cheers

Dry

Of course you are right. Can be done this way.

BTW I emailed you the download link for the german language file.

Thanks again

This is great. I’m converting my site from Wordpress to EE and was using the Gatekeeper plugin for the longest time - which works great. This will be the EE replacement for that.

Great extension!

I have found a bug though, or at least a bug on my end.

I’m using this on my blog currently (http://www.randomjabber.com) and have filled each of the eight questions and answers in the settings for the extension. Each with a unique question and answer.

The bug I’ve found comes into play when you you enter in an answer that is the wrong answer, but it one of the other eight possibilities of answers.

For example. If I have these two questions and answers in the captcha settings:

Question: 1+1 is equal to
Answer: 2

Question: Is fire hot or cold?
Answer: hot

So, if I go to my site and am faced with “1+1 is equal to” I can answer “hot” and it will still accept it. I assume because it was one of the other 7 answers that I’ve specified in my settings for the extension.

Granted, this probably won’t be much of a problem, but a bug nonetheless.

Thanks

Hi Deron,

This seems to be a ‘feature’ of the EE captcha system. If you refresh the page with the comment form then a new validation word is generated. It seems as if any words generated during your session will be accepted as valid! At least, that is what happens on my install 1.6.0 20070627. I’ll do some digging to see if I can figure out why this is happening.

Cheers

Dry