I’ve had my Help and Support form for my WordPress Google Form plugin online since April and it has greatly improved my ability to help people use my plugin. I get all of the information at one time where as before it took several passes via email to get all of the data I typically need to resolve an issue.
Up until about two weeks ago, I never got any spam via the form but lately I’ve been receiving 2-3 form submissions per day that contain nothing but gibberish. So it got me thinking about how to implement a Captcha solution. A Captcha solution has been requested several times and I’ve never looked at it seriously because (a) Google doesn’t support it and (b) it wasn’t something I thought was terribly important. I am rethinking my position how important it is! 😉
The fact that Google doesn’t support a Captcha solution is the biggest hurdle. The challenge is to add the necessary code to the HTML generated by Google, recognize and process the Captcha, and it is passes, remove the Captcha input prior to submitting the form values to Google for processing. This becomes a more complicated issue on a multi-page form: Does every page have a Captcha or only the last page with the Submit button?
I don’t have a solution yet but this is something I am noodling on as I have some spare cycles. The solution will almost certainly be jQuery based, I can’t think of a better way to do it and I am already using jQuery to process radio button inputs so they can be converted from PHP style inputs on the WordPress side to Python style inputs on the Google side.