Tired of receiving PuglyFeet form mail about "One XXX Night in Paris", dicks, and blowjobs, I've been aggressively on the prowl for a Movable Type captcha plugin. I tried the following to no avail:
- Captcha by Hirotaka Ogawa
- MT-Scode by James Seng
- Scode by Arvind Satyanarayan
Each claimed *ease of use* liberally. Uh-huh. Right. Since the thought of writing my own captcha was out of the question, I persisted and persistence sure has paid off. I thank my guardian angel, Saint Google, for leading me to reCaptcha and the author of the MovableType plugin for it, Josh Carter.
Okay, I encountered a minor bump in the road: After I rebuilt the site, the "Show Settings" option was not available from the settings page. I thought, "Shit -- another lousy plugin." Before giving up completely, however, I inspected Carter's Recaptcha.pl file and learned that the default setting for the plugin's enable value was 0 (or false). I then set it to 1 (true), rebuilt the site and lo and behold, the sweetest feeling of joy came to me thereafter. It worked -- the "Show Settings" option became viewable from the reCaptcha plugins page!
So, if you're looking for a captcha plugin for MT, go to Carter's page: http://multipart-mixed.com/software/recaptcha.html and follow all the instructions before proceeding further. If you 're unable to see Recaptcha.pl's "Show Settings" from the MT Plugins' Settings page, do the following:
- Open MT/plugins/Recaptcha.pl
- Go to Line 64 and change the hash value for settings[enabled] from 0 to 1
- Rebuild your site
- Now you can enter the public/private keys into Recaptcha's settings
- Refresh your comments page
- Voila, you're done and beaming with rapturous joy
Fun fact:
CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". If you're unfamiliar with Alan Turing, the father of computer science, you owe it to yourself to get acquainted with his life and his work. If it weren't for Alan Turing, the landscape of our world would be very different -- it'd be ruled by the Nazis.
