Nice Text Captcha

by Neil Smith

This generates text-based CATPCHAs that are "nice", by my own personal subjective definition!

Questions are purposely simple, and examples would include:

• How many letters are there in the word 'White'?
• In the word "tiger", what is the letter in the 5th position?
• How many animals are in the words: "cat", 'Orange', and "dolphin"?
• What is 'four' + "nine"?

There are plenty of choices out there, but none quite met my personal needs (or some client's needs) for one reason or another:

• I wanted a self-contained solution that wasn't reliant on a 3rd party service
• Relatedly, I didn't want to have to muck around with API keys to get it working
• I wanted a few different question types, not just simple maths-based ones
• I didn't want long/odd words and case that make the question difficult to understand at first glance (so no "What's the first adverb in the list discombobulation, deFeNEStraTE, DiscOncErTinGly, DiSiNTEGRATing. Enter the name of a good Jack Black film if you don't think there are any adverbs. Enter a surprising fact about cheese if you don't think Jack Black has done any good films.")

You call a method in your view which both generates a random question, and places the possible answers into a flash[] object, stored in a SHA2 hash.

(It's stored in a flash, as Rails handles ageing the data after a request - if we used the session, it would hang around for the duration of the session.)

Then, in your controller action, you call a method which extracts the answers from the flash, and injects them into your model.

A validation method on the model finally checks the answer against the hashed possible answers, and pushes an error onto the base of your model if the answer doesn't match.

For numerical answers ("What is 'two' plus 'three'?"), both numbers ("3") and words ("three") are accepted.

• Tested against Rails 3.1
• 'linguistics' gem for turning numbers into words and ordinals (gem install linguistics)
• 'Digest/SHA2' for hashing the possible answers.

Simply add:

config.gem 'nice_text_captcha'

to your environment.rb file, and install the gem via your preferred method.

or for Rails 3, add the following line to your Gemfile:

gem 'nice_text_captcha'

and run:

bundle install

In your model, you need to add some validation:

class Thing < ActiveRecord::Base
  validate :check_nice_text_captcha
end

In your controller, you need to add a call to populate the answers from the data in the session:

class ThingsController < ActiveRecord::Base
  def create
    @thing = Thing.new(params[:thing]) # as normal
    validate_nice_text_captcha_for(@thing)
  end
end

Finally, in your view, you need to render the question by calling nice_text_captcha, and give the user a text box for their answer:

<% form_for(@thing) do |f| %>
  <!-- normal form elements here -->
  
  <%= f.nice_text_captcha %> <!-- this will generate a label with the catcha text inside -->
  <%= f.text_field :nice_text_captcha %>
  
  <!-- probably a submit button here -->
  
<% end %>

If you don't want a label, because you want to generate your own, you can pass the :exclude_label option:

<label for="i-am-going-to-create-my-own-label">
  <%= f.nice_text_captcha :exclude_label => true %>
</label>

First, you'll need to create an initializer to set things up, in, say, config/initializers/configure_nice_text_captcha.rb, with the following code:

Formtastic::FormBuilder.send :include, NiceTextCaptcha::FormBuilderExtensions

Then, a little bit of hooking into Formtastic's helpers should yield something like the following:

<%= form.input :nice_text_captcha, :as => :string, :label => captcha.nice_text_captcha(:exclude_label => true), :input_html => { :value => nil } %>

(Using input_html to set the value to nil by default means that the user's answer doesn't get carried over between failed form fills - this is desirable, as the question will change, so there's no point in carrying over the answer.)