Have you ever felt annoyed by spam emails or comments?

Most of those spam submissions are automated with bots. The bots will send spam emails or comments randomly.

For WordPress users, there are several ways to prevent spam or fake submission from the site.

One of the most common way is to use reCAPTCHA and it looks like this:

I believe a lot of you saw this “I’m not a robot” thing before.

This is called reCAPTCHA developed by Google and it provides a simple test to tell humans and bots apart. The test is easy for humans to solve, but difficult for bot and other malicious software to figure out.

However, you are helping machine learning systems for free when you use reCAPTCHA developed by Google.

They are collecting massive data and use it for their AI development. Users are providing human interaction data by “click a car” and make their AI smarter. Some people think that a privacy concern.

If you are looking for privacy-friendly alternative to reCAPTCHA, I would highly recommend hCaptcha!

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hCaptcha is a spam prevention system for the website as well as to make money providing your test data. What does it mean? Your website earns Human Tokens (HMT) whenever users use the hCaptcha widget on their site. And then machine learning companies will pay for these Human Tokens to get their data labeled.

In other words, companies bid on the work your users do as they prove their humanity and also you get the rewards if you use hCaptcha. “Earn rewards for human solves,” yes, this is something new.

You can donate that reward to your favorite charities too. hCaptcha will add features that users on your site will be able to see your contribution to charity through the hCaptcha interface.

That’s a good discreet branding on your business.

They also support initiatives like Privacy Pass to balance privacy and security. My favorite part of hCaptcha is the user experience.

Here are some examples of hCaptcha:

I really like these fewer annoying tasks. They use sophisticated machine learning models and it looks like a very simple tasks, but prevent spam for sure!

A quick note about hCaptcha:

hCaptcha is free to use for publishers and the free plan includes:

• Earn rewards
• World-class anti-bot protection
• Works in every country
• GDPR and CCPA-friendly privacy policy

Enterprises plan is not free, but you’ll have more control and solutions available. You can customize these tasks. Make your own task easy for humans, hard for bots.

Ok, now how to add hCaptcha on your WordPress site?

Good news! WPForms support hCaptcha integration.

What is WPForms?

WPForms is a beginner-friendly WordPress plugin that allows you to create a powerful but affordable form builder. It’s a drag & drops WordPress form builder, so you don’t need any coding knowledge. You can create contact forms, payment forms, survey forms, newsletter forms, registration forms, etc.

This site, Happier Freelancing also use WPForms to create contact form.

With WPForms, You Have Two Choice

Once you installed and activated WPForms on your WordPress, you’ll see “WPForms” on your navigation bar. Click it and go to CAPTCHA.

You have an option to choose either hCaptcha or Google’s reCAPTCHA.

Once you pick one of the services, you’ll see your choice in the form builder. Just click it and add on to your form. You can adjust your Fail Message, enable No-Conflict Mode, and so on. Customize it for your business need.

If you chose hCaptcha, your WordPress form will look like this:

Wrapping Up

Both WPForms and hCaptcha aim to make running your small business website easier. These two tools make your online life and/or business safer and convenient.

If you already installed WPForms, try hCaptcha on your form. If you haven’t installed WPForms, install it on your WordPress. It’s free!