ClickOnChris

Recently I started noticing a lot of spam posts on my website. It must be those internet hacker bots! I wondered if I could put one of those fancy image verification things into my site to stave them off. They’re called ‘captchas’ and it turns out that its simple and easy to implement such a thing in Ruby on Rails using the reCaptcha plugin. Here are the instructions I wish I had when I started:

1. install the reCaptcha gem. I’m using Aptana/RadRails IDE which has a nice interface to install gems, but I hear you can install it via the command line with something like ‘gem install reCaptcha’

1. Register for public and private keys at recaptcha.net .This is also a good tutorial of how a captchas and reCaptcha works. You will have to add your public and private keys to your config/environment.rb file.

1. insert the reCaptcha function calls into your code:
   recaptcha_tags() – put this into your®html form to generate the challenge image.
   verify_recaptcha() – when inserted into the controller, checks the data passed from the form to make sure that the correct ‘answer’ was given. returns boolean

Thats it! Add a comment to test it out!