Charging money for captcha is inexcusable

  • At first this plugin looked promising and fulfilled everything I needed, and then I went to enable captcha. The authors of this plugin force you upgrade to the ‘Pro’ version (currently $9 monthly) to get access to a simple yet important function that is offered FREE almost anywhere else. Google, who provide the reCaptcha service that actually does all the heavy lifting offers it for FREE. The feature that IceGram offer for an extra cost takes virtually no effort to implement. They will argue that you get so many more important and unique features in the ‘Pro’ version, but the fact is that captcha is an important and NECESSARY feature that should be offered at no extra cost. I refuse to trust any company that operates on such a greasy business model that profits from taking advantage of people who need access to a necessary feature, but may not know any better.

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  • @samarium We don’t allow links in reviews.

    Hello @samarium,

    We would like to inform that we do have measures for spam registrations/subscriptions in the Email Subscribers’ free version. In the free version, we do honeypot checking and also provide an option to block domains from which you don’t want to allow subscriptions.

    The above mentioned features provide essential immunity from spam in the free version, but for users who expect more security, we provide the captcha and auto-blocking systems as additional choices in the premium versions.

    We would also like to clarify that we aren’t forcing people to upgrade to paid plans. We just want to provide more choices to choose from in premium versions and make the free version, simple and flexible which anyone can install and get started with.

    Thread Starter samarium

    (@samarium)

    > an option to block domains from which you don’t want to allow subscriptions.

    This method of spam defence is pointless and you know it. Who is going to manually add domains to a blocklist each time they get spammed? The spammer is always one step ahead with auto-generated domain names, it’s a useless solution.

    > we do honeypot checking

    Much better than a blocklist but far from enough. Most spam bots can easily detect honeypot forms and bypass them.

    > The above mentioned features provide essential immunity from spam

    This is simply not true. Blocklists are useless and honeypots by themselves are not enough. Captcha + honeypot is a decent solution but you ensure your users have to pay for that. Why not offer the reCaptcha in the free version and the honeypot in the paid version? The answer is because reCaptcha is better, and you use that to profit from people needing access to this FREE Google provided service.

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