Plugin Manager Plugin
I'd like to be able to enable plugins (espcially antispam ones) on a per-blog basis (instead of globally). This is a list of other people who have asked for the same thing (or something similar) within the last year:
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=15207
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=16696
The Idea: The Plugin Manager would add a "Plugins" tab to the Blog settings screen. From here, the blog owner (not necessarly the administrator) would be able to enable and disable the plugins he[1] wants to enable on that individual blog. It would also provide a transparent (can we say complicated‽) way of allowing the owner to change the configuration of the plugins without modifying the global settings.
[1]While I appreciate the effort to include the feminine perspective in writing, typing out "him or her", "hers or his", "he or she", etc, is time consuming and reading it breaks the flow of the prose. I'll continue to use the masculine form to include the feminine as I learned back in the day, and hope that my readers understand I mean no disrepsect to anyone.
reCAPTCHA Plugin
I originally published the reCAPTCHA plugin in May of 2007. After a couple of months of tweaking, I moved onto other projects and let it languish. I've since had some time to revive this plugin and have updated it in several ways. I've also migrated it to this site rather than my personal blog because it is a better fit here. I hope that people are finding this plugin useful.
Introduction to reCAPTCHA
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.
--http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Rather than generating a random string of characters for a user to solve to prove their humanity, reCAPTHCA scans old print media and uses the Internet masses as a decentralized optical character recognition (OCR) program. One of the words presented is known, the other is not. The assumption made is that if the known word is submitted correctly, then the unknown word is correct as well. Over time, if the same unknown word is solved the same way by multiple reCAPTCHA solvers, then they have a high confidence that is what the word actually is.
To address accessibility concerns of blind people, reCAPTCHA also provides an audio captcha. If your computer does not have the required plugin, it can download an MP3 for you to listen to.
reCAPTCHA Plugin
This plugin allows b2evolution users to assist the reCAPTCHA project in their goal of digitizing old media while providing hurdle for spammers to cross. It is not the ultimate answer to blog spam, but it is one tool available to you. For those who care, starting with the 1.0 version of the reCAPTCHA Plugin, I'm licensing the plugin under the same terms as the reCAPTCHA library, included in the LICENSE file, basically a single-clause BSD license.
I'd love to get feedback from those who are using this plugin, if it is doing its job or if it can be improved. Please leave a comment here or on the b2evolution plugin page or forums. Thanks for your interest!
Table of Contents:
- Introduction (this page)
- Installation Instructions
- Configuration Instructions
- TODO list
XML Feeds