Show Captchas in the form
Note: In fact, many Captchas are easier to solve, especially for AI-supported spam bots, than for humans.
Visforms supports both its own Captcha and the hCaptcha.
To use the Visforms Captcha, a simple direct configuration in the form configuration is sufficient.
To be able to use the hCaptcha, additional settings must be configured.
You need individual access keys for hCaptcha, which you can obtain from the
hCaptcha Enterprise
website.
alternatively or cumulatively
Captchas and spam protection plug-ins can be used alternatively or cumulatively (at the same time). The settings are form options that you make in the form configuration on the Spam protection tab. They can therefore be set individually for each form.
Activate on the “Spam protection” tab
The use of captchas is activated via the Use captcha option in the form configuration on the Spam protection tab. The Use captchas option offers three setting options:
- None,
- Visforms Captcha,
- hCaptcha.
General Captcha settings
In the form configuration on the Spam protection tab you can:
- Assign an individual Captcha label.
The individual Captcha label is used instead of the default label “Captcha”. - Completely suppress the display of the label for the Captcha.
- Assign an individual Captcha Tip Text.
This is displayed when the user moves the mouse over the input field of the Captcha. - Assign an individual error message.
This is displayed if the user forgets to enter the Captcha.
Visforms Captcha
Visforms comes with its own Captcha implementation.
The Visforms Captcha is:
- secure,
- GDPR compliant,
- slightly easier to decipher compared to Google reCAPTCHA with the same level of security, making it more effective for the user.
You can individually specify for each form whether a Visforms Captcha should be displayed.
To do this, select the Visforms Captcha option in the form configuration on the Spam protection tab, Captchas group, for the Use captchas parameter.
There are specific options in the form configuration on the Spam protection tab, Additional options for Visforms Captcha group.
It can be individually configured for each form, including:
- Choice between text task or math task,
- Choice of the degree of illegibility of the image.
The Visforms Captcha is completely GDPR compliant.
In particular, the following points help to ensure absolute conformity:
- It does not use external platforms, such as Google.
- It does not store any data.
- The code for the Visforms Captcha comes 100% from Visforms and is not an extension from a third-party provider.
- There are no external interfaces whose changes we cannot control.
Settings in the form configuration
The settings in the form configuration on the Spam protection tab without explanatory texts from the inline help:
hCaptcha Enterprise
You can use the hCaptcha Enterprise service in Visforms to integrate an hcaptcha into the form.
Visforms has its own implementation of the hcaptcha interface for this.
You can specify individually for each form whether it should perform an hcaptcha check.
To do this, select the hCaptcha option in the form configuration on the Spam protection tab, Captchas group for the Use captchas parameter.
To use hcaptcha in Visforms you need a hcaptcha website key and a hcaptcha secret key.
You can get these on the website of
hCaptcha Enterprise.
You can access the Visforms configuration via Visforms Dashboard » button ‘Options’.
Enter your two hcaptcha keys in the corresponding options on the Global tab:
- hCaptcha website key
- hCaptcha secret key
Please also note the following entries from the hcaptcha service provider’s documentation:
- Note on Using an hcaptcha on a localhost.
- Note on CSP settings when using an hcaptcha.
Settings in the Visforms options
You can access the Visforms configuration via Visforms Dashboard » Button ‘Options’.
The Google reCAPTCHA plugins
Joomla 5 has removed the Google reCaptcha services from its core area and no longer contains a reCaptcha plugin.
Visforms also no longer supports the Joomla reCAPTCHA plugin from Joomla 5 onwards.
You can find further details in the overview under the point
Google-dienste reCAPTCHA v2 und v3.
Reasons against integrating further Captchas
Many different Captcha versions
There are many different Captcha versions. Visforms already supports hcaptcha and Visforms’ own Captcha. Visforms also includes the Visforms spam protection plugin, an anti-spam honeypot and the options for custom validation.
Every now and then we get a request asking whether we could integrate this or that captcha into Visforms.
We have decided against integrating additional captchas for the following reasons:
- The integration is complex, especially the clean display across all supported UI frameworks.
- The captcha integration is a maintenance-intensive part of Visforms.
This is also because the captcha interfaces unfortunately change frequently. - The use of captchas is generally viewed critically and should be avoided if possible.
- If the Visforms spam protection plugin is not sufficient, in our experience you can stop spam bots very effectively with simple means.
For example, a custom validation can be stored on a form field.