Description
The 2BC Form Security WordPress plugin will increase security and reduce spam by using tools like the Google reCAPTCHA V2 widget (noCAPTCHA CAPTCHA) and a honeypot field. While simple, these can be very effective at keeping spam bots and scripts out of your site.
Features
2BC Form Security can now add the reCAPTCHA widget to BuddyPress! Simply fill in the API keys, enable reCAPTCHA, and check the Registration Form under the Where To Display section.
2BC Form Security will automatically activate a honeypot on the log in form, registration form, and comment form. With a few minutes of setup, it can also display the Google reCAPTCHA v2 widget in any of the same locations.
The reason captcha and honeypots work is because spam bots and scripts have a hard time reading CSS and Javascript when they are trying to fill out a form. The honeypot is hidden from a normal user, but a bot will try to fill in the field with some information. If anything is detected in a honeypot field, 2BC Form Security will return an error and prevent the action from happening.
Google reCAPTCHA has historically been difficult because Google used warped pictures that were hard for bots AND humans to fill out. Now it has been condensed into a Javascript widget, otherwise known as the new noCAPTCHA CAPTCHA. No more letters and numbers that are hard to read, simply click the widget to proceed. This is the first level of defense: bots have a hard time detecting or clicking Javascript elements in a web page. However humans have a very easy time, even on mobile devices.
If spam bots are able to figure out a way around this, Google has added many additional layers of defense and have prepared extra questions. Some of the new challenges will be incredibly hard for a bot to work out, but are still easy on humans and actually fun to complete!
In addition to adding the honeypot and Google reCAPTCHA tools, 2BC Form Security has the following features:
Statistics page in the admin section – make sure to enable this on the options page
Optional login error rewrite – prevents hackers from figuring out valid user names
Mark failed comments as Spam, or put into the Moderation Queue
Dashboard widget
Style the Google reCAPTCHA widget in either of the current themes: Light or Dark
Compatible with BuddyPress 1.6+
Future updates include integration with bbPress, Contact Form 7, and a shortcode for custom forms.
Documentation
The 2BC Form Security documentation page contains an explanation of all the settings, as well as how to setup and run the plugin.
* Requires WordPress 3.6, and PHP 5.2+