Learning Stuff About ‘Website Building’ Category


Beware Raz-Captcha WordPress Plugin

I was looking for a plugin to add a captcha on my wordpress blog’s registration page.  I’ve been getting too many bots registering to my site and cluttering my mailbox and my true list of subscribers. So I decided it was high time I dealt with this. Hence my search for the captcha plugin.

While searching the wordpress plugin resource page, I came across a plugin called raz-captcha. The description said it did just what I wanted and more. I was primarily looking for something that would put the captcha on the registration page, but this plugin claimed to not only do this, but also place one on the login page. Great!

So I downloaded and installed the plugin. I went to the set up page and selected the options I wanted.  Then it was time for the moment of truth. I logged out and went to the registration page. Yes! It worked! Ok so all is well, and I’ve gotten rid of those bots…

Well not quite so fast. For now it was time for me to log back into my blog to do some work. So as normal, I clicked the login link, but to my chagrin, I get a blank page. Nothing! I refresh and still nada. So how the hell am I supposed to get back into my site?

Fortunately I know what I am doing. Now if this ever happens to you, you can try doing what I did. You will need to login to your hosting server. That’s what I did. Then I navigated to the plugin directory and renamed the raz-captcha.php file. I went back to my site and the login page was up. So I logged in and went to the plugin page. My intention was to deactivate the raz-captcha. But before clicking the deactivate link, I went back to the plugin directory on the hosting server, and renamed the plugin to what it was originally. Then I deactivated the plugin and deleted it.

Maybe the plugin works for a different version of wordpress (I think I’m using 2.7), or it could be an incompatibility with my theme.  So beware the raz-captcha plugin. Proceed with caution.

I ended up going with the CYC plugin. It doesn’t seem to have the option to put the captcha on the login page, but the bot registration was what I wanted to eradicate, so this will do.

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