July, 2022: Monthly Report

We are mCaptcha. We build kickass CAPTCHA systems that give (DDoS) attackers a run for their money. And we do all of this without tracking your users. Oh and did I mention our UX is great?

Hello and welcome to the July, 2022 monthly report!

TL;DR

Codeberg is trying out mCaptcha, Gitea is getting mCaptcha support, mCaptcha supports MariaDB, I’ve applied for NLnet and Open Tech Fund, documentation is updated: tutorials and glossary is added and glue libraries have new releases.

Codeberg is deploying mCaptcha

Codeberg is committed to trying out mCaptcha to make their platform more accessible: they currently use a text-based CAPTCHA, which will be replaced by mCaptcha. The decision was finalized after I presented mCaptcha to them at a meeting their organized. Please see here for slides.

Gitea gets mCaptcha support

@Gusted from Codeberg is working on integrating mCaptcha in Gitea so that Codeberg can deploy it. Please see here for related the pull request.

This project is yet to see usage, so we are venturing into uncharted territory: should you face issues with either deploying or integrating mCaptcha, please feel free to reach out.

mCaptcha supports MariaDB:

Codeberg uses MariaDB. To facilitate Codeberg deployment, I implemented support for MariaDB. The work done in May, 2022 made implementing support easy. Support for MariaDB is first class in mCaptcha: automatic testing exist to run tests with both Postgres and MariaDB, so I expect things to be stable.

Applied for Funding: NLnet and Open Tech Fund

I’ve applied for NLnet and Open Tech Fund[0], Please find the applications here and here respectively.

If funding is granted:

1. I’ll be able to work full-time for a year at the rate of 2,000 EUR/month
2. We’ll have a dedicated build server
3. We’ll have funds to run a DDoS test to gauge mCaptcha’s effectiveness

Documentation updates

mCaptcha docs over the months have become inconsistent and incorrect. I cleaned up some of the mess and added a tutorial to help folks install mCaptcha on their website. The docs also gets a glossary, which contain explanations to mCaptcha jargon.

New releases: glue libraries

0.1.0-alpha-2 for vanilla, react and svelte glue libraries were released. They now hand over widget sizing to the client code(associated PR).

Footnotes

• [0]: Special thanks to @humantech for his thoughtful reviews and to @dachary for pointing me towards OTF.