Introduction
Friendly Captcha is a service that protects websites from bots and abuse in a privacy-friendly and accessible way. To learn more about the company or service, you can visit the Friendly Captcha website.
This site contains the technical documentation that will help you integrate the Friendly Captcha's anti-abuse service into your website. Integration entails adding a widget to the websites you want to protect. The Friendly Captcha widget looks like this:
What's different about Friendly Captcha?
Other captcha systems like Google reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha invent tasks for website users that are meant to be easy for humans but impossible for bots. An example is clicking on images that contain cars.
These tasks are annoying for many of us, but they can even become a barrier for some users. Those with difficulty seeing or hearing, or with advanced age, or who just lack technical savvy, might struggle to complete them.
Another reason many organizations adopt Friendly Captcha is for its commitment to data protection and user privacy. Friendly Captcha does not rely on user tracking or cookies for its protection service, and offers a true EU-only offering.
How does it work?
The Friendly Captcha widget serves a cryptographic puzzle which is solved by the user's device. The Friendly Captcha system analyzes various signals to compute a risk score, which is used to increase the difficulty of the puzzle. The main idea is that abusers will get high risk scores and difficult puzzles, while normal users will get low risk scores and easy puzzles.
This happens in the background, so that by the time a user is ready to submit a form on your website, the puzzle is often already solved.
Next Steps
- Follow the Getting Started tutorial to add Friendly Captcha to your website in 3 steps.
- Visit the Friendly Captcha website.
- Upgrading to v2? Follow our guide.