SolveMedia

Solve Media's patent-pending technology turns CAPTCHA into branded TYPE-IN™ Ads. Solve Media's technology improves site security, and every time a user types a brand message into a TYPE-IN™ Ad, we share the revenue with our publisher partners.

The Solve Media gem makes it easy to use the Solve Media unit in your Ruby and Rails projects.

Backward Compatibility

This new gem provides improved compatibility with Rails 3 and is now also usable in pure Ruby as well. If you used a previous version of the Solve Media gem, your keys were stored in config/solvemedia_config.yml. Keys are now configured with the rest of your application config, in config/application.rb, or in one of the environment config files. Since we recommend keeping your API keys in a separate file outside of version control, you may wish to keep solvemedia_config.yml. See "Setting API Keys" below.

This gem is not directly backward compatible with Rails 2. Rails 2 users should continue to use the old gem.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'solvemedia'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself with:

$ gem install solvemedia

Usage

Setting API Keys

Before using Solve Media, you need to sign up for an account and get a set of API keys.

To use within a Rails 3 project, you must set these keys within the app config. Inside config/application.rb:

config.solvemedia.ckey = "Your Challenge (Public) Key"
config.solvemedia.vkey = "Your Verification (Private) Key"
config.solvemedia.hkey = "Your Authentication Hash Key"

In addition, you can set these keys on a per-environment basis by using the environment configuration files under config/environment/. For instance, you may wish to create a second set of keys with the security mode set to "Security" instead of "Revenue", to avoid receiving ads during development.

These API keys should remain private and not be checked into version control, so we recommend storing them in a separate YAML or Ruby file. There are a number of resources on the web dealing with configuration for Rails project, and we encourage you to use a solution appropriate to your project.

Displaying the Puzzle

To display the Solve Media puzzle within one of your form views, simply call {SolveMedia::ViewHelpers#solvemedia_puzzle solvemedia_puzzle}.

<% form_for(@user) do |f| %>
    #...
    <p>
        <%= solvemedia_puzzle %>
    </p>
    #...
<% end %>

Verifying the Response

The {SolveMedia::ControllerMethods#verify_solvemedia_puzzle verify_solvemedia_puzzle} method verifies the user's input, returning true if the user solved the puzzle correctly.

respond_to do |format|
    if verify_solvemedia_puzzle && @user.save
        #...
    else
        #...
    end
end

verify_solvemedia_puzzle can also be used to add an error to a model object if the verification fails:

respond_to do |format|
    if verify_solvemedia_puzzle(:model => @user, :error_message => 'Solve Media puzzle input is invalid') && @user.save
        #...
    else
        #...
    end
end