HACKER Q&A
📣 chatmasta

Best non-reCAPTCHA CAPTCHA solution?


Does anyone have recommendations for privacy-respecting, hopefully open source, captcha solutions? I just want something low tech, usable and reasonably effective, to use on a signup form. Mostly interested in stopping dragnet spam.

I like the “balance the goat” thing that GitHub has, from arkoselabs, but it seems like you have to buy their whole enterprise anti-Fraud solution.

Does anyone know of a simple, effective option?

  👤 wheelie_boy Accepted Answer ✓
Depends on the amount of traffic you're expecting. If it's very light, rolling any kind of captcha of your own will work.

For example, on a moderately popular (~100 comments a day) phpbb forum I used to run, I had a custom captcha that was a single image and a single correct answer. It completely stopped all my spam issues.

Eventually I would have needed to upgrade it, but it never got to that point. Nobody wanted to specifically spam my forum.