Summary: Over the years, WordPress has become a target for spammers due to it increasing popularity.Unfortunately, automated software exists whose purpose is to crawl the web in search of websites that are built with any popular platform, such as WordPress, and to submit hundreds, even thousands of spam comments. Spam comments are very annoying, they consume our precious time when it comes to moderating and deleting them.I know you hate spam comments as much as I do and would love to know how to combat them. One way of deterring bots from submitting spam comments is by integrating a CAPTCHA to the comment form.In previous tutorials, we learned how to integrate CAPTCHAs to the WordPress login and registration form.In similar fashion, we’ll now run through how to integrate a CAPTCHA with the WordPress comment system.There are many CAPTCHA plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory such as WP-reCAPTCHA and Securimage-WP-Fixed.The aim of this tutorial is to not create yet another CAPTCHA plugin but to:Demonstrate how the WordPress HTTP API can be used in a plugin.How to include additional form fields to the WordPress comment form.How to validate and utilise the values added to custom fields.Without further ado, let’s get started with the plugin development.Plugin DevelopmentFirst off, head over to reCAPTCHA, register your domain name and grab your public and private API keys.Include the plugin header.
