Making Forms More Secure with Recaptcha

Today, webmasters must expect and contend with an onslaught of spam, hackers, and bots that try to take down  websites or break into databases. For security, we recommend adding Google's reCAPTCHA to forms on your website. Below are general instructions for obtaining a reCAPTCHA key for your site and implementing it, but we recommend reading Google's most up to date information here.

 


Getting Your Keys

  1. Log into your Google account. If obtaining a key for a parish website, we suggest using a parish email if available. Oftentimes, a priest or lay person will request keys and then if they move, the parish is left without the necessary information.
  2. Navigate to www.google.com/recaptcha/
  3. Click on Admin Console in the top right corner


     
  4. Here, you'll want to fill out the form. If you have questions about any specific form item, click the circle with the "i" inside.


     
  5. Under "Owners" you can now add additional email addresses. Consider using a general parish email, if you haven't already.
  6. Accept the Terms of Service, then click Submit
  7. You'll now have your recaptcha keys

  8. Copy the keys by clicking "Copy [Site/Secret] Key".
  9. You can also see implementations by clicking on the "See client/server side integration" links. These will open new browser tabs.

 

Add to An HTML Form

If you're using a regular HTML form, check out this Google documentation for how to add recaptcha to your form.
 

Add to EVO CMS Listserv Snippet

To add to the EVO CMS Listserv snippet, copy your two keys to a text editor, or just keep the browser tab open for now. Go to this article and follow the instructions there.