When I was building this site with a contact form, I knew I needed something to prevent malicious bots from overloading my inbox with emails, and I did not want to use Google reCaptcha. Bots are not just an annoyance — they can flood your inbox with spam, waste server resources, and even try to exploit weak points on your site. For a small personal site, that kind of activity can quickly become overwhelming, so having a lightweight way to filter bots was important to me.

The biggest issue with Google reCaptcha is the puzzle, which frustrates many users. When users are navigating websites, they want simplicity; running into Google reCaptcha often ruins their experience. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to solve puzzles, and there is always that one edge case where you second-guess yourself about whether you should click on a piece of the puzzle that has only a tiny sliver of the required object. ReCaptcha does have an invisible mode, but they are not well known for respecting privacy, and I wanted to factor user privacy into my decision.

There are other options such as Friendly Captcha, mCaptcha, and hCaptcha. They all emphasize user privacy and accessibility, as well as compliance with many privacy laws such as GDPR in the EU. I chose hCaptcha due to its free tier (keeping in mind that reCaptcha is mostly free up to 10,000 assessments).

The next step was integrating it into my website, and I chose to implement what is called a composable in Vue. Composables are useful for reusable stateful logic that can be shared across multiple components, with state tracked only within the component where it is called. If you try to call a composable in one Vue page and use it in another, the state management results will differ. For that particular case, you would want to use the Pinia Store.

By using the hCaptcha code as a composable, one can implement hCaptcha in several places such as contact forms, user signups, and payments (to help prevent bots from committing credit card fraud).

You can check out my small code project on this by going here, and the repository is here. I also have an entry on my projects page for this.

If you see any issues, please feel free to reach out on my contact page!