I started to get some spam through my website and it was all similar. They were filling out the form for an advanced copy of one of my books, and then it had a weird message in another language. It was most likely a bot, so the time has arrived for me to attach a recaptcha to my forms.
I had done this several years ago, but as usual, everything "updated" and my old instructions were useless. So it took me about four hours to figure out how to add a recapture to a Contract 7 form and this blog post is an instructional on how to do it.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: WHAT YOU WILL NEED:
- You need to add two plugins to your wordpress website. Contact form 7 and Really Simple Capture. As part of the Really Simple Capture, this should upload a temporary folder to your server entitled wpcf7_captcha and another one called wpcf7_uploads. Photos of all of these are on the picture board above.
- You will need to register your website with google to use a recaptcha, so go to www.google.com/recaptcha and fill out the form to register your website. More on this below in the actual instructions. As part of this process you will get a Site Key and a Secret Key. You will need to copy and paste these somewhere safe so you can retrieve them later. You will also get a google recaptcha admin page link and you may want to record this too in case you want to watch and see what kind of bots it blocked from your site. But that isn't crucial to get it to work.
- Now, somewhere along the line, I wound up being redirected to a website called Softaculous.com for and had to pay to 'join' to use the captcha, but I am not sure if that is absolutely necessary. It cost $24.00 for the year and I decided that I send enough emails and get enough traffic that a $24 service fee was more than reasonable, so I purchased it. This may have happened to me because I was engulfed in a lot of confusion going from plugin to plugin and back to google captcha, so all I can say is good luck!.
