Four things you need to know about Recaptcha

Paul Hatcher

Working on a project where we needed a (slight) proof of humaness, and we opted to use Recaptcha as it has a fairly simple integration with .NET.

Was fine until we wanted to use custom styling to tie in with the site which is when the fun started! A few hours later, after downloading the project’s sample app, I found some things out that I thought I’d share with you…

  1. The Recaptcha control must be positioned after the recaptcha_image div and recaptcha_response_field
  2. The killer: your recaptcha_response_field must have a name attribute of recaptcha_response_field as well as its id - otherwise Recaptcha won’t see it.
  3. You can specify your public/private key in the web.config AppSettings rather than against the control; RecaptchaPublicKey and RecaptchaPrivateKey respectively.
  4. You can turn off Recaptcha validation either by setting the SkipRecaptcha property of the control or RecaptchaSkipValidation.

The first two are the most important to getting Recaptcha to work with custom styling; I know the properties are documented on the control, but I managed to miss them for a couple of hours so I thought others might do the same.