Introducing: hCaptcha Protection
This month we are excited to announce the release of hCaptcha which has been fully integrated into the platform and is now the default spam protection option when creating forms on your websites! 🤖
The introduction of hCaptcha allows us to address a wider industry issue for our users; today we are seeing spam and bot attacks targeting websites with a higher frequency and sophistication than ever before.
From today, both Siteglide and platformOS teams recommend that you use the integrated hCaptcha option instead of the now deprecated reCAPTCHA offering, to minimise risk of spam attacks and increase control of usage on your sites.
What is hCaptcha?
Many of you will know of the name “reCAPTCHA” which is one brand of CAPTCHA which has been provided by Google since its acquisition in 2007 to help protect websites from spam by identifying bots automatically. However, the concept of CAPTCHA has been around far longer, it’s just that reCAPTCHA has become the most commonly used in recent years largely because it is free, accessible and delivered by one of the biggest companies in the world.
hCaptcha is the world's most widely used independent CAPTCHA service with a focus on performance, privacy and security.
A better CAPTCHA
We reviewed a number of other CAPTCHA solutions, but in the end we selected hCaptcha for a number of reasons including: cost, performance, security and user experience.
Cost 💰
As hCaptcha is fully built into our platform, there are no API calls needed for verification which contribute to your site usage, unlike reCAPTCHA which requires one API call per form submission as it is a 3rd party API integration.
Performance 📈
In the battle against malicious bots, hCaptcha takes an entirely different approach, designed with scalability, accuracy, and performance in mind without relying on historic data or the personal information of users.
hCaptcha only needs to be integrated on pages you want to protect, not on every page of your site like reCAPTCHA v3. It can be implemented with just one line of liquid, which outputs only 3 lines of code.
Security 🔐
hCaptcha adapts to threats automatically thanks to built in advanced machine learning capabilities. It adapts and learns, constantly providing a better experience and reducing the likelihood of a false positive, penalising users.
In addition, hCaptcha provides heightened protection against spam by re-checking the challenge result at every stage of the form submission process.
User Experience 📱
hCaptcha is totally device and browser agnostic, providing a low friction experience to all end users alike. reCaptcha on the other hand requires the presence of Google cookies and personal information to provide a similar low friction experience, which means it will often penalise legitimate users if they are not logged into a google account.
hCaptcha is also specifically designed to protect user privacy and complies with GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, PIPL, and other mandates.
Start using hCaptcha today
Ready to add a better level of protection to your sites at less of a cost as well?
Head over to your Site Admin today and Edit Form Structure on one of your existing forms to make the switch. Look for the renamed “Spam Protection” tab to select and save the new hCaptcha option.
For those of you using custom Form layouts, once you have edited and applied hCaptcha to your form, checkout the Default layout to copy the latest CAPTCHA code across to your custom layout and replace the previous version.
If you’re looking to create a new form in your Siteglide site, hCaptcha will automatically be selected in the Spam Protection tab for you so that you will be fully protected by default.
For more information checkout the doc: Forms - Spam Protection
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