Some time ago I disabled my wp-recaptcha plugin because it had the unfortunate side effect of marking all comments as spam. I don’t have a particularly high comment rate, but the ones I do get, and which get past akismet, are usually OK. Apparently a flaw in version 2.9.6 surfaced when wp-recaptcha was used in conjunction with wordpress 2.9.2. I obviously got caught with this when I updated my wordpress installation so when I noticed the problem I just disabled wp-recaptcha. Of course I have since updated wordpress again and I noticed that the plugin had also been updated to 2.9.7 so I thought I would upgrade and reactivate. Upon doing so, however, I discovered that my public/private key pair had disappeared as a result of the deactivation and I was invited to apply for a new set. OK, no problem, happy to do so but a bit peeved that the keys seemed to be deleted when the plugin is deactivated. This strikes me as unnecessary.
But, and this is now a big but, this is what I was greeted with when I attempted to get a new set of keys:
“reCAPTCHA is now part of Google. In order to use it, you must create a new Google Account or sign in with an existing Google Account.
If you are a previous user of reCAPTCHA, you can migrate your old account after signing in with a Google Account.”
Yikes! It seems that re-captcha is now part of google. The chocolate factory have bought yet another piece of internet infrastructure which will no doubt feed the maw of the advertising goliath with statistics gained from my site.
Well bollocks to that. It can stay disabled. I’ll look for another captcha mechanism.