Gatekeeper 1.5 rc5
Published 18 years, 8 months pastIt only took most of a year for this to happen, but WP-Gatekeeper 1.5 RC5 is now available. The only change is that it will now auto-add the challenge to any standard WordPress 1.5 install from the moment you activate the plugin. Before now, this auto-insertion wasn’t working on any WordPress install that had gzipping turned on, as many do. A heap of thanks to Jeremy Dunck, who first identified the problem; and Andy Skelton, who showed me how to solve it.
For those who joined the party in the long silence since RC4, Gatekeeper is a WordPress plugin that lets you manage a series of challenge/response pairs. The default challenge is “What color is an orange?” (correct response: “orange”), though you should definitely disable that one and add your own. This helps stymie spambots, though of course it is easily defeated by a manual spammer—and they do exist—and it can do nothing to stop trackback spam. I actually stopped using Gatekeeper on meyerweb when I installed Akismet, which may be good enough for most people. For those who can’t or won’t run Akismet, though, Gatekeeper is a decent alternative.
Gatekeeper is technically a CAPTCHA, but it is a fully accessible CAPTCHA, as it uses no images. It’s also highly configurable, allowing you to add as many challenges as you like and then rotating between them randomly. I know of a few sites that are quite happy with Gatekeeper, and recently caught wind of a Django implementation of the same concept.
So it’s there and ready for use by those who are interested. If I haven’t heard about any bugs within the next month or so, I’ll strip off the RC designation and go with 1.5 final. And about time, too.
Note to WordPress 2.0.x users: I have no idea if WP-Gatekeeper 1.5 will work in WP2. It may. Then again, it may not. I’d be interested to know either way.