reCAPTCHA plugin error messages

Monday, 04 February 2008

By default, on two of my installs of reCAPTCHA Plugin for WordPress – v2.7, I receive no error message if the captcha is entered incorrectly… the user of the weblog is to assume that they made a mistake I guess…

That is until I wrote this script to check for error messages being passed around on the URL by the plugin:

if (window.location.search != '') {
  var searchArray = window.location.search.split('&');
  for (var i=0; i < searchArray.length; i++) {
    var searchSubArray = searchArray[i].split('=');
    if (
      searchSubArray[0] == 'rerror'
        && searchSubArray[1] == 'incorrect-captcha-sol'
    ) {
      document.write(
        '<p>The two words in the picture were typed incorrectly.</p>'
      );
    }
  }
}

Just drop that snippet into your “comments.php” template. When the captcha is filled in incorrectly, the plugin adds “rerror=incorrect-captcha-sol” to the url. This checks for that string, and if found, writes an error message in red.