Icon Captcha

Icon Captcha is a simple captcha implementation using NodeJS.

Our Goal

Our goal was to create an easy to use captcha for use with contact forms and other low risk applications. This captcha was not designed to be extremely secure, but rather as a simple way to block spam form submissions.

Use Cases

This captcha is easy for the end user to complete and easy for developers to implement. Only a few lines of code are needed to add the captcha to a form and verify the captcha once submit.

Like most captchas, this captcha is not meant to be the primary security measure for an application.

The primary use case is to block spam submissions on contact us forms and similar applications.

Getting Started

You can host Icon Captcha yourself or use our hosted service at iconcaptcha.com. Click here for instructions on hosting Icon Captcha.

The following instructions explain how to set up Icon Captcha using iconcaptcha.com

Step 1: Link to the front end api

To get started add the following link to your head tag.

<script src="https://iconcaptcha.com/captcha/api.js" async defer></script>

Step 2: Add the captcha to your form

Add the following div tag to your form. Make sure the tag is inside a form to have the captcha id be included with the form submission.

<div class="icon-captcha"></div>

The script included in step one will automatically add the captcha to this tag on page load.

If the captcha does not load automatically in your environment you may need to load the captcha manually. This can happen when you are using a framework, such as VueJS or MarkoJS, that modifies the DOM. Either of these functions will populate "icon-captcha" div.

window.loadCaptcha();
loadCaptcha();

Step 3: Obtain the captcha id

Upon successful completion of a captcha, the unique captcha id is stored in a form input. You can access the captcha id via the captchaid POST parameter upon form submission.

Client side you can also use one of the following functions to obtain the captcha id:

window.getCaptchaID();
getCaptchaID();

Step 4: Verify the captcha server side

Captchas must be verified within 3 minutes of creation and can only be verified once. After verification the captcha is removed from the database. If verification fails the user must submit a new captcha.

To verify a captcha make a post request to https://iconcaptcha.com/captcha/verify with the captcha id.

Verification Request

URL: https://iconcaptcha.com/captcha/verify METHOD: POST

Parameter	Description
id	The unique captcha id, available via the captchaid POST parameter upon form submission.

Verification Response

TYPE: JSON

{
    verified: boolean
}

verified is set to true for a successful captcha attempt and false for an incorrect captcha attempt.

Examples/Demo

Coming soon

Self Hosted

Instructions coming soon.

Author

Hunter Stratton