Kitgenix CAPTCHA for Cloudflare Turnstile vs Mailgun

Kitgenix CAPTCHA for Cloudflare Turnstile adds Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA and anti-spam protection to WordPress, WooCommerce and a wide range of form, membership, community and ecommerce plugins. Challenges are not treated as a client-side decoration: submitted Turnstile tokens are verified server-side with Cloudflare before a protected action is accepted. The plugin is designed for site owners who want to reduce automated login attempts, fake registrations, comment spam, bot-driven checkout abuse and unwanted form submissions while using Cloudflare’s privacy-oriented Turnstile challenge rather than a traditional image CAPTCHA. Configuration, integration controls, diagnostics and local verification metrics are managed inside WordPress. The only service required for CAPTCHA functionality is Cloudflare Turnstile itself; no Kitgenix verification proxy is used. Learn more about Kitgenix WordPress plugins at Kitgenix. Supported WordPress and Plugin Integrations The codebase contains dedicated integrations for: WordPress login. WordPress registration. Lost-password and password-reset flows. WordPress comments. Custom login forms produced with wp_login_form(). WooCommerce login, registration, lost password, checkout and related account flows supported by the integration. Easy Digital Downloads. Elementor forms. Contact Form 7. WPForms. Gravity Forms. Fluent Forms. Formidable Forms. Forminator. Ninja Forms. Jetpack Forms. JetFormBuilder. Kadence Forms. MailPoet. bbPress. BuddyPress. wpDiscuz. Ultimate Member. MemberPress. Paid Memberships Pro. Kitgenix Plugin Score integration points included in the codebase. Each integration is loaded conditionally and can use integration-specific display/validation behaviour rather than forcing one generic hook onto every form system. Server-Side Turnstile Verification The browser obtains a Turnstile response token from Cloudflare’s official widget. When a protected form is submitted, the plugin sends that token to Cloudflare’s official Siteverify endpoint using the WordPress HTTP API. The protected action is allowed only when the verification result satisfies the integration’s validation flow. This server-side step is important because simply placing a widget in the browser is not sufficient protection on its own. The plugin tracks the most recent verification response, error codes and latency for diagnostics and can record aggregate verification metrics locally. Setup Verification for Login-Sensitive Forms Login, registration and other account-sensitive protections can be gated behind a setup-verification state. The administrator can verify the configured Site Key and Secret Key before those protections are treated as ready. This reduces the risk of enabling a broken key pair on a login screen and accidentally locking legitimate administrators or customers out of the site. Site and secret keys can be supplied from plugin settings or from supported environment variables/constants, allowing security-conscious deployments to keep the secret outside the normal WordPress options table. Replay Protection Turnstile tokens are intended to be short lived and single use. The plugin includes optional replay protection that hashes accepted tokens and temporarily remembers that hash. A token that is submitted again during the replay window can be rejected rather than being accepted repeatedly. The replay window is filterable for developers. Stored replay information is a hash/temporary value, not the raw challenge token itself. Honeypot and Layered Anti-Spam Controls An optional honeypot can be rendered alongside Turnstile. This adds a second low-friction signal for simple bots that fill fields a normal visitor never sees. The plugin also supports whitelisting logic so trusted requests can bypass the challenge where appropriate. Whitelist decisions can take account of configured rules and developer filters rather than hard-coding one bypass mechanism for every site. Trusted Proxy and Client IP Handling Sites may sit behind Cloudflare, another reverse proxy or a load balancer. The client-IP component can be configured to trust proxy headers only when the request path matches the trusted-proxy configuration. This avoids blindly believing spoofable forwarding headers from arbitrary visitors. Administrators can also choose whether the resolved visitor IP is included in the Siteverify request to Cloudflare. A developer filter is available to change that behaviour when required by a site’s privacy or infrastructure policy. Widget Appearance and Placement The plugin supports central defaults plus integration-level overrides for Turnstile appearance. Depending on the supported integration, administrators can control options such as theme, size, appearance and language, and can choose placement behaviour where the integration exposes more than one suitable hook. A manual shortcode is also registered: [kitgenix_turnstile] The shortcode is useful when the site owner needs to render the widget in a supported custom workflow. Rendering a widget alone does not automatically secure arbitrary custom PHP processing; custom form handlers must still validate the submitted token server-side. Diagnostics, Metrics and Site Health The plugin includes diagnostics for configuration and verification health, local counters for passed/failed checks, latency information, recent verification events and integration-level metrics. Site Health integration can surface configuration or connectivity issues to administrators. Developer Mode adds additional troubleshooting detail without changing the fundamental requirement that live submissions be verified correctly when protection is active. Settings Portability Settings can be exported and imported for controlled migration between WordPress installations. The transfer system is designed for plugin configuration rather than for exporting visitor submissions or unrelated site data. Performance and Script Loading The public Cloudflare Turnstile script is loaded only for pages/contexts where the plugin determines that a Turnstile widget may be needed. The loader includes duplicate-script detection so multiple integrations do not intentionally enqueue several copies of the same Turnstile API script. Public assets are kept separate from the admin interface, and admin-only diagnostics/settings code does not need to run as part of every anonymous form request. Privacy and Data Flow Turnstile is an external service provided by Cloudflare, so challenge rendering and server-side verification necessarily communicate with Cloudflare. The plugin itself stores configuration and limited diagnostic/aggregate verification data locally. It does not require a Kitgenix account and does not send form contents to Kitgenix for verification. The exact Cloudflare data flow, WordPress.org Hub request and Google Fonts admin request are documented in the External Services section below. Common Uses Protect a WordPress login page from automated credential attacks. Reduce spam registrations on WordPress or WooCommerce. Add anti-bot verification to WooCommerce checkout and account forms. Protect Elementor and popular WordPress form plugins with one central Turnstile configuration. Add a challenge to membership, forum and community registration/login flows. Replace more intrusive CAPTCHA experiences with Cloudflare Turnstile while keeping server-side validation. Developer Notes Shortcode [kitgenix_turnstile] Main settings option kitgenix_captcha_for_cloudflare_turnstile_settings Useful filters Script and display: kitgenix_captcha_for_cloudflare_turnstile_script_url kitgenix_turnstile_freshness_ms kitgenix_turnstile_inline_style Verification: kitgenix_turnstile_siteverify_url kitgenix_turnstile_siteverify_timeout kitgenix_turnstile_siteverify_sslverify kitgenix_turnstile_siteverify_http_args kitgenix_turnstile_send_remoteip kitgenix_turnstile_remote_ip kitgenix_turnstile_token_from_request kitgenix_turnstile_error_codes kitgenix_turnstile_error_message kitgenix_turnstile_replay_message kitgenix_turnstile_skip_wp_login_validation Replay protection: kitgenix_turnstile_replay_ttl Whitelisting and proxy handling: kitgenix_turnstile_is_whitelisted kitgenix_turnstile_trust_headers kitgenix_turnstile_trusted_proxies Operational alerts: kitgenix_turnstile_alert_window_seconds kitgenix_turnstile_alert_failure_spike_min_failures kitgenix_turnstile_alert_failure_spike_failure_rate kitgenix_turnstile_alert_http_error_min_failures Developer logging action: kitgenix_turnstile_dev_log The plugin also exposes context-specific error-message filtering through kitgenix_captcha_for_cloudflare_turnstile_{context}_turnstile_error_message. Privacy and Local Data The plugin stores its configuration in the WordPress database. Depending on enabled features it also stores local operational data such as setup-verification state, aggregate integration metrics, the recent event log and replay-protection transients. The recent event log is limited to 50 events and contains operational fields such as time, integration, success/failure, error codes and Siteverify latency. It does not store raw form submissions, the raw Turnstile response token, the visitor’s raw IP address or the request URL in that log. Turnstile itself is an external Cloudflare service and receives data when a widget is loaded and when the server validates a token. See External Services below. External Services This plugin relies on third-party services for specific functionality. These connections are documented here so site owners can make an informed decision before enabling and using the plugin. Cloudflare Turnstile Cloudflare Turnstile is the CAPTCHA / bot-verification service that provides the plugin’s core protection. A Cloudflare account and Turnstile Site Key / Secret Key are required. When a protected widget is rendered, the visitor’s browser loads Cloudflare Turnstile from: https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js The browser communicates with Cloudflare as part of the Turnstile challenge. As with normal web requests, Cloudflare can receive network/request information such as the visitor’s IP address and browser/request metadata, and Turnstile evaluates browser signals to generate a verification token. When a protected form is submitted, the WordPress server sends a POST request to: https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/siteverify By default, that request contains: The configured Turnstile Secret Key The Turnstile response token The visitor IP address as Cloudflare’s optional remoteip parameter when an address is available The remoteip value can be disabled by developers with the kitgenix_turnstile_send_remoteip filter. Cloudflare documentation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/ Cloudflare Terms: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/ Cloudflare Privacy Policy: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ WordPress.org Plugin API The shared Kitgenix Hub in wp-admin uses WordPress core’s plugins_api() functionality to request public WordPress.org plugin-directory information such as plugin details, active-install counts, ratings and media. These requests occur on Kitgenix administration screens. The plugin supplies WordPress.org plugin slugs to WordPress core; the outbound request itself is handled by WordPress and can include normal HTTP request metadata generated by WordPress. Responses are cached locally with WordPress transients to reduce repeat requests. WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/ WordPress.org Privacy Policy: https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/ Google Fonts The Kitgenix administration stylesheet imports the Inter and Manrope font families from Google Fonts. This occurs on Kitgenix plugin administration screens, not as part of the Turnstile verification request itself. Loading those font resources causes the administrator’s browser to connect to Google-hosted domains such as fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, which can receive normal request information such as IP address and browser headers. Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/ Google Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy Google Terms: https://policies.google.com/terms Trademark Notice Cloudflare and Cloudflare Turnstile are trademarks or services of Cloudflare, Inc. This plugin is independently developed by Kitgenix and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Cloudflare, Inc. WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks belong to their respective owners. References are descriptive and identify supported integrations. Support Development Kitgenix CAPTCHA for Cloudflare Turnstile is free software. If the plugin is useful to you, you can support continued maintenance and development through the Donate link shown on the WordPress.org plugin page. More WordPress plugins and development resources are available from Kitgenix.

Most email validators look for an @ and a .(dot) some go further and blacklist certain domain names. But Mailgun’s Advanced email validation service goes deeper and looks for the existence of the domain name, presence of a MX record and the custom ESP(Email Service Provider) grammar. The grammar here is the rules defined by each email provider. For example, Yahoo Mail addresses can only contain letters, numbers, underscores, and one period. So [email protected] perfectly passes the is_email() function but can never exist as it contains more than one period. Such addresses can’t escape Mailgun’s Email validation. Why use Mailgun’s email validation service? Performs the usual email syntax check. Checks the existence of the email domain. So [email protected] can’t escape. Checks if the email domain has a MX record. So [email protected] is caught. Checks if the username complies with the grammar of its ESP (Email Service provider). Eg Gmail doesn’t allow usernames less than 6 characters and hyphens so [email protected] and [email protected] can’t get away. Why use this plugin? Integrates with the is_email() function of WordPress. So it works seamlessly with Contact Form 7, Jetpack/Grunion contact forms, WordPress registration form and any form which uses the is_email() function. Kicks spam before it is inserted into the database Ensures that the commenting process is uninterrupted even if Mailgun suffers a downtime Works completely transparent, nothing changes in the frontend This plugin requires a Mailgun Public API Key which can be obtained by signing up at Mailgun. If you’re trying out this plugin on a local WAMP/LAMP/MAMP installation make sure your system is connected to the Internet for this plugin to contact Mailgun. Available Languages English Serbo-Croatian by Borisa Djuraskovic Spanish by Andrew Kurtis Further Reading Read about Mailgun’s email validation service. http://blog.mailgun.com/post/free-email-validation-api-for-web-forms/ http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-improvements-to-email-validation-api/ Mailgun Address Validator demo and its source code The Mailgun Email Validator Plugin official homepage.