Form spam is a real pain and we're trying to make it easier to block it on your website. We've had support for image-based CAPTCHA for a while now, but it's not always the prettiest thing and bots are getting smarter. To give you another option in the fight against spam we recently integrated Google's reCAPTCHA service into all forms in BranchCMS.
Quoting Google's developer page: "reCAPTCHA is a free service that protects your site from spam and abuse. It uses advanced risk analysis techniques to tell humans and bots apart."
You can see it in action in the comments form below.
Getting Started
Setting up reCAPTCHA is pretty easy. First step is to log into to Google with your Google account and register your domain.
After that log into the administration for your site and click on "Site Settings" in the upper right. Then click "Integrations".
Click on the "Integrate Google reCAPTCHA" button and enter the Site Key and Secret Key from your Google reCAPTCHA page in the appropriate fields.
You are now ready to use reCAPTCHA on your forms.
Simply edit the form you are using, go to the "CAPTCHA" tab and select "Google reCAPTCHA" for the CAPTCHA Type field.
The last step is to make sure that the form template includes the CAPTCHA tag.
The default form templates automatically include the {#form.captcha.tag} variable tag to output the CAPTCHA field. If your form template has been customized then you will simply need to place the following tag where you want the reCAPTCHA widget to show:
{#form.captcha.tag}