Sweet Captcha

We have all have heard of or used a captcha before. Sweet Captcha has a catchy name but it’s not so sweet to your website. Like we mentioned in our earlier blog, this is a major plugin on the blacklist. Not only is it not wanted by hosting companies, but it is also dangerous to your website. We can hear you going “Yeah right, how could it be so bad?” Let us tell you all about it and why you should stay away from it.

What is Sweet Captcha?

Captchas are a way to help keep the spam contact forms from happening. Bots aren’t able to do the action which keeps them from filling up your inbox with useless forms. It can be anything from a “Check if Human” box to identifying images or doing a simple math problem. Some come as an option in form plugins and others are from a captcha plugin. Sweet Captcha was a plugin you installed to add a captcha to your site. However, this is a case of a good plugin gone bad.

Why is it bad?

We normally link the plugin pages when we talk about a plugin. If you noticed, we didn’t this time. As a matter of fact, you can’t get this plugin anymore. It was taken down because of the damage it would to website. It was made to integrate into many different platforms which was a good thing. But it was found out that there was hidden ad code in the plugin. This allowed for dangerous pop-ups (everyone just LOVES those annoying pop-ups right?) that directed back to scams or to download dangerous software.

Because of the dangers of backdoor ads which can allow other viruses or hackers into your website, WordPress took down the Sweet Captcha plugin. The plugin did try to resurface under a different name, jumpple, which WordPress has also shut down. Some plugins are only blacklisted by a certain hosting for various reasons. But some just are bad and not wanted by anyone. If you are currently using Sweet Captcha, take our advice…don’t use it. Uninstall it and find another way to secure your forms. Next week we are going to be talking about a puzzling plugin, Hello Dolly!