Matt Farina - Tech / Faith / Life

Those of us who have used the captcha module for drupal have experienced the pain of working with it. Over the past year there have been many times where the released version just didn't work. Or, you had to deal with the captcha always failing on cached pages. Sure, you could get around this with a little fancy hacking; but, for many drupalers that was more complicated than they could handle. With the new release, thanks to Rob Loach, it all just works.

The new release is entirely re-written and includes modules for image and text captchas on top of the default math captcha. These modules are not only easy to install but they are easy to configure. And, unlike textimage (the old image captcha) this image captcha works right out of the box without any tweaking needed.

Caching is no longer a problem. Pages with a captcha aren't cached any longer so captcha won't fail due to page caching. This does mean performance will take a hit and there are instructions to help with that. For example, set the comment reply form to be it's own page.

From a developer standpoint this release is a lot better. The code is commented. There is plenty of documentation. Where caching is disabled, the module doesn't set the page to be cached rather than deleting the page from the cache. This saves on database queries. Overall, it's well written.

This new release is self contained. The previous version of captcha required other modules to do a lot of what it does. Modules like the Form Store module or Textimage module. This release seems to do it all.

I do have one feature request, though. This new module only allows you to put captchas on the comment form, contact mail form, the user mail form, user password forms, and the registration page. It would be nice to add additional forms. Here is an issue just for that.

If you want to add additional forms without a nice interface it's relatively easy. After you install the module head over to your database and find the new table "captcha_points". In this table add a new row. The form_id is the form name. For example, the forum node page is "forum_node_form". Set the module and type to NULL. If you are in phpmyadmin there should be a check box to do this. Once the row is added head back to your catcha admin settings and the new form should be there to configure.

Overall, I am impressed and relieved this new version is here. This is already making my life a whole lot easier.

Update: Rob Loach politely pointed out that if you check the box next to "Add captcha adminstration links to forms." you can add a link to any form. Thanks Rob.