I agree that adding pro-active built-in spam prevention is a wonderful idea. Style Pack does include moderation tools that will help address spam AFTER it’s been posted, and has a few language settings that will help prevent SOME spam, but I do see a void for better pro-active spam prevention, and Google recaptcha is a common tool thrown at that void to try to prevent spam.
I personally hate any kind of captcha period and don’t use them. There are scripts/bots that can defeat them, and there are even cheap paid services that spammers use that will easily defeat them. Besides their ineffectiveness, captchas put the burden of spam management on your users, when it’s not their problem in the first place. They also slow down your site in the process. It’s like using a broken sledgehammer to try to accomplish a precision task.
I personally do 3 things to protect my forums, and it’s been more effective than any captcha I’ve ever used.
1.) Add several hidden Project Honey Pot links within the site overall, and within registration/topic/reply forms. Catches a small % of bots, but reports the data so common spam software adds them to their block lists.
2.) Add a hidden required field to registration/topic/reply forms that is set with a specific value that no human user will see. If the value is changed, it indicates a bot or malicious user changed it, so the message is rejected.
3.) Inject a hidden field via JS to registration/topic/reply forms that will only be added to the form if javascript is enabled (most bots don’t have it enabled). If the field doesn’t exist on form submissions, reject the message.
With that layered approach, I don’t get spam, period. And it’s all completely invisible to forum users. No cluncky, ineffective, burdensome captchas, or math puzzles, or “type this phrase” junk. No end user ever wants to see that junk in the first place. Spam control isn’t their problem and site owners should never make it their problem. (Think I made the point… done preaching for now :))
Perhaps, integrating those 3 above into Style Pack would be of interest and valuable to Style Pack users?
If Google ReCapthca is still requested after those are added, then perhaps it would be considered, but I don’t want to spend any time coding for something that’s ineffective and burdensome to users no matter how popular or common it is.
