WordPress Plugins Begin Adopting Cloudflare CAPTCHA Alternative Turnstile
Cloudflare’s Turnstile is receiving assistance from WordPress plugin creators. However, certain members of the WordPress community aren’t ready to accept the plugin at this point.
Cloudflare recently unveiled an alternative focused on privacy, CAPTCHA, that is entirely non-intrusive and free to use. The WordPress plugin community is slowly providing support for this new technology.
But not all plugin makers are eager to provide support for Turnstile and offer motives that could inspire others to reconsider their choices.
Cloudflare Turnstile
Turnstile is a solution focused on privacy to block spammers from all forms the user could fill in, like the contact form, user registration form, or login form.
In addition to being a fact, it does not record user information. The other thing that makes it valuable is that it’s almost invisible and can provide an uncomplicated user experience for website visitors.
Someone who has added Turnstile to their website reported that of the 127 site visitors, only one was in the spotlight by Turnstile.
The tweets read:
Out of 120 hits, only 1 needed to pop a check-box to verify being human
— Chris sev (@chris__sev) September 29, 2022
Turnstile is a solution focused on privacy because it does not gather or store information about users.
As per Cloudflare:
“In June, we announced a partnership to work with Apple to use private access tokens.
Customers using operating systems that can support these tokens, like the new version for macOS or iOS, can now verify their identity without having to fill out a CAPTCHA or give out personal information.
In collaboration with third party companies like device makers and device manufacturers, who already have information needed to validate a device, are able to abstract parts from the process of validation and validate data without doing anything or storing the data instead of contacting devices directly and asking the manufacturer to handle the work for us.
Private Access Tokens are integrated right into Turnstile.
While Turnstile is required to examine specific data from sessions (like the headers of a session, as well as user agents and browser attributes) to verify users without exposing them to any risk, Private Access Tokens enable us to limit the collection of data by soliciting Apple to confirm the device on our behalf.
Furthermore, Turnstile never looks for cookies (like the login cookie) or uses cookies to gather or store information of any sort.”
Integration with WordPress
Cloudflare’s announcement about Turnstile did not mention the possibility of a WordPress plugin that would integrate it into WordPress websites. TechCrunch quoted a Cloudflare representative saying that a WordPress plugin is being developed.
TechCrunch revealed:
“Cloudflare is developing plugins for major platforms such as WordPress to help make Turnstile simpler to install …”
Some WordPress plugins already integrate Turnstile into their applications, making it easy for users to pick the service.
The developers of the WS Form WordPress plugin added Turnstile support to the plugin on October 4, 2022, which makes WS Form another choice for users who want to use it.
A couple of days later, the developers of the Fluent Forms WordPress plugin added support for Turnstile on October 7, 2022, and posted a guide for how to utilize Turnstile.
The Site Reviews plugin, currently utilized by over 40000 WordPress publishers, has been updated to support Turnstile on October 11, 2.2.
The Contact Form 7, used by more than five million WordPress publishers, hasn’t added support with Turnstile.
A publisher who requested Contact 7 support in adding Turnstile pointed out that support from the government is required for the integration of Turnstile to Contact Form 7:
“…The migration instructions offered by Cloudflare are more appropriate for an unresponsive website or static page.
You will need to make a different migration using WordPress and CF7 CF7, which involves …modifying the CF7 ReCaptcha module’s files and the contact template.
It seems easy to look up the source code of CF7 and then build the module from scratch.”
There’s a request to integrate it in contact Form 7 posted on GitHub; however, the form’s creator has responded with a statement that they will not add support for the form at this point.
They presented their positions on the Turnstile.
“For the moment, I’m interested in supporting Turnstile natively.
Cloudflare hasn’t yet provided enough evidence to support Turnstile is superior to ReCAPTCHA in terms of privacy.
It’s also still in the open beta.”
One of the people within Contact Form 7 GitHub’s Contact Form 7 GitHub feature request has responded to the statement of the publisher that Cloudflare did not provide “sufficient basis” to allow the switch away from reCAPTCHA to protect privacy:
The authors wrote:
“I consider it a fact that Google’s primary business is advertising (which gets analytics from the people who use their product is sold to advertising), and Cloudflare’s business involves offering services to individuals as well as companies that purchase their services is an excellent base for the differences in their motives as well as their distinct approach to privacy.
One example is that Mozilla has joined forces with Cloudflare due to the dedication to privacy Cloudflare can demonstrate and the absence of conflict of interest between users’ privacy and commercial activities (which is different from Google’s). (Disclosure that Mozilla employs me).”
The editor was contacted:
“Maybe I’d rather not accept the PRs. The turnstile doesn’t look very appealing to me. I’d suggest making it an individual plugin.”
Turnstile is currently in Beta.
The reason cited by the author of Contact Form 7 to not include Turnstile at the moment is true.
When a product is a beta, it is ready for use by anyone. However, it could have some glitches and needs testing.
So anyone installing Turnstile is testing it to test for Cloudflare.
Many users are enthusiastic about turning to Turnstile because Cloudflare is an established brand well-known for its security, privacy, and top-quality solutions to help publishers speed up the speed of their websites.
Turnstyle is another free alternative to Recaptcha.
-” Adam J. Humphreys (@Making8) October 11, 2022
Integration with other WordPress plugins could continue to expand, providing another method of preventing unwanted spammers on WordPress websites.
