Talking Drupal #489 - IXP Community Initiative

Today we are talking about The IXP Fellowship Initiative,
Workplace Developer Training, and making Drupal better for the
little guy with guests Carlos Ospina & Mike Anello. We’ll
also cover Cloudflare Turnstile as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/489
Topics

What is the IXP initiative

Why does the community think this is important

What is the current status

What changed in the last 10 years

How do we encourage businesses to do this

How can people get involved

Resources

Turnstile

Intro blog post from Cloudflare

Irvine reCAPTCHA Study

Deep dive on Google Scholar

Alternatives

https://www.drupal.org/project/hcaptcha -
privacy-focused alternative, still image-based

https://www.drupal.org/project/altcha - open,
self-hosted option. Seems more basic.



Posts referencing Irvine study


https://boingboing.net/2025/02/07/recaptcha-819-million-hours-of-wasted-human-time-and-billions-of-dollars-google-profit.html


https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/24/googles_recaptchav2_labor/


https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/a-2023-study-concluded-captchas-are-a-tracking-cookie-farm-for-profit-masquerading-as-a-security-service-that-made-us-spend-819-billion-hours-clicking-on-traffic-lights-to-generate-nearly-usd1-trillion-for-google/





Widgets

IXP Fellowship

Drupal Couple

Talking Drupal 488 - Drupal Open University

Get Involved in IXP

#ixp-fellowship on the Drupal Slack Workspace



Guests

Carlos Ospina - adrupalcouple.us camoa
Mike Anello - drupaleasy.com ultimike
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Avi Schwab - froboy.org froboy
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu


Brief description:

Have you ever wanted to use Cloudflare’s Turnstile web
service to secure Drupal web forms, as an alternative to more
intrusive CAPTCHA widgets that force users to select squares
that contain traffic lights, cars, or bicycles? There’s a
module for that.



Module name/project name:

Cloudflare Turnstile



Brief history

How old: created in Sep 2022 by Adam Weiss (greatmatter)

Versions available: 1.1.13 which works with Drupal 9.4,
10, and 11



Maintainership

Actively maintained

Security coverage

Number of open issues: 6 open issues, 3 of which are
bugs, with 2 of them postponed



Usage stats:

3,981 sites



Module features and usage

Anyone who maintains a Drupal site is well acquainted
with the need to mitigate form spam submissions. Best
practices around which tool to use are an ever-changing
conversation.

Recently Google announced that reCAPTCHA implementations
will need to be associated with a Google Cloud account, and
will need to enable payment for anything that exceeds the
free allowance of 10,000 assessments per month

reCAPTCHA v2 widgets are notorious for the challenges
they can present to actual users, particularly image
challenges. In addition, a 2023 UC Irvine study concluded
that “the true purpose of reCAPTCHAv2 is as a tracking cookie
farm for profit masquerading as a security service”, so it’s
definitely worth considering other solutions

Cloudflare developed turnstile as a CAPTCHA alternative,
designed to provide security while minimizing the friction
for actual users. More importantly, Turnstile never harvests
data for ad retargeting.

A free Turnstile account can create up to 10 widgets,
with unlimited usage.

The turnstile module plugs into the existing Drupal
CAPTCHA ecosystem, so it can be an easy swap out for anywhere
you’re currently using CAPTCHA widgets.