I began developing this plugin in 2013 with a simple goal in mind: 1 block spam without annoying users. Your clients don't want to decipher garbled words or play "Find the Storefront". Over several years, it evolved from a disjointed medly of basic functions into an advanced, easy-to-use pure javascript plugin with customizable spam filtering.
1. Goals accomplished with head-banging. Fueled by coffee.
Currently v4.4.0-rc (See Older Versions)
Summary of options, which can be toggled on/off when initializing the plugin:
Want to quickly add Crema Captcha to your project? Here's how to get started.
Copy-paste the stylesheet <link>
into your <head>
before all other stylesheets to load our CSS.
<script src="https://unpkg.com/@cremadesign/captcha@4.4.0-rc/dist/captcha.min.js"></script>
npm install @cremadesign/cremastrap
in the console.So having less spammy emails in your inboxes doesn't convince you?
We understand; you'd rather see the numbers.
For the past few years, we've noticed an uptick in the amount of contact form spam we get from our website. Scammers will often deploy a special program called a bot that searches the internet for contact forms, emails, etc. Once a bot finds one, it can send you fake advertisements, phishing scams, links to malware-ridden sites, etc.
When I rebuilt our company website in early 2017, I decided to try out an official captcha plugin for our CMS. As you can see below, it was a complete failure. In July, I started saving all the spam that came in, so that I could analyze it when I had an opportunity. I've parsed and compiled one-and-a-half years of daily spam data into the interactive chart below.
July 2017 – November 2018
We finally took action after our spam count started spiking at the end of 2018. Since previous versions of our plugin were working really well on client websites, we decided to give our homebrew captcha a much needed upgrade1. So in December, I rewrote our previous loose collection of captcha and validation functions into my first jQuery plugin — adding cool new features like Russian and Profanity filters along the way.
Why rebuild what works? Since all previous versions were functions built for FormMail forms (not plugins) — we started running into compatability issues when implementing it on new sites. Some sites used one type of form; others used a different CMS. This resulted in us having different versions for different purposes, which made everything more difficult to maintain.
As you can see below, our contact form spam dropped to zero the day we implemented this captcha.
This chart represents daily spam before and after implementing this captcha.
After being implemented on our company website, this plugin went through several rewrites to add new filters, reduce alternate versions, remove jQuery, and make it more efficient. Crema Captcha v4.0 has already been deprecated, due to incompatible changes. The latest plugin is v4.4.0-rc.
To read more about the differences between versions, please view the version history.
Version History