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I was asked to do this a while back, but I could never find anything suitable and didn’t have the time to sort it out, but now I have - I’ve made myself use a captcha rather than make people sign in.

I know, it’s crap having to register and sign in for every thing you do on the internet, and it is troubling also as every time you do, you are exposing your email address to more and more spam which will eventually finish that address off - try having an email addy on a busy website for 10 days… Long story short: making people register and sign in is off-putting and prevents discussion. or perhaps no-one is reading the blog…

Anyway, anyone can leave a comment on any post, just by entering a short word - I’ll still have to moderate it, but hopefully won’t get 500 “viagra” “cialis” or “hot teen/pregnant/granny strips and does depraved things…” messages each morning.

I’ve used another of my trademark modified plug-ins to work-around a few issues I thought were important for such a WordPress Captcha plugin:

1. No cookies - many captcha plugs use cookies, I don’t like forcing cookies on anyone unless absolutely necessary, so I haven’t;
2. No requirement for any third party to host/run captcha - lots of captcha plugins use other site’s captcha software, or hosted captchas. No thanks. Not for me. Let’s keep things on my server thanks, then I know why things have gone tits up!
3. Can change the words in the captcha and have as many as you like! That’s right, and take a look at some of my captchas - this sort of thing would keep me amused for hours - I’d just refresh the page a lot and see what funny messages were on there. Seriously, though, it is good that I can change the words around as often as I like, to prevent bots from learning them or anything like that…

That’s it. If you’d like a copy of the captcha plugin, leave a comment (using the new captcha) - if enough of you seem to want one, I’ll get one up on the site… Otherwise, there are some on the Wordpress Codex - I don’t know if this is ready to unleash on the world at large just yet!!