When hosting open forms on a website, it's often desirable to add a level of protection to prevent abuse from spambots. To help with this Vendr Reviews comes with out of the box support for hCaptcha, a free to use captcha service, to ensure that your reviewers are indeed human.
Sign up For hCaptcha
To enable the hCaptcha feature, you will first of all need to head to the hCaptcha site to sign up for a hCaptcha account.
In the top right hand corner, click the Signup button and on the options screen, select the Add hCaptcha to your service (free) option.
On the next screen, you can enter your credentials to sign up with, or use a GitHub account to gain access.
hCaptcha Settings
Once signed up you can navigate to https://dashboard.hcaptcha.com/ to access the hCaptcha dashboard where you will need to locate two required settings. The first is the Secret Key which can be found in the Settings section.
The second setting is a Site Key which you'll need to navigate to the Sites section and define a new site entry for your website. From within your site entries settings you'll be able to access it's Site Key.
App Settings
With both settings located, enabling hCaptcha support in Vendr Reviews is as purely a matter of defining two app settings in your Web.config
<appSettings>
<add key="VendrReviews:hCaptcha:SiteKey" value="YOUR_SITE_KEY" />
<add key="VendrReviews:hCaptcha:SecretKey" value="YOUR_SECRET_KEY" />
</appSettings>With the app settings defined, your review form will automatically display the hCaptcha widget and the relevant server side logic will be activated to validate the hCaptcha widgets response.
Testing Locally
Please note that when testing Vendr Reviews locally with hCaptcha enabled you must access the website via a non-localhost URL. If you access the site on localhost you will likely see a hCaptcha error of Rates limited or network error. Please retry. Please see the hCaptcha Docs for workaround solutions.