mCaptcha VS Listmonk

What about proof of work based CAPTCHA like https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha ? Since CAPTCHAs can be solved by bots, at least make it more costly for them.

That should only be an issue if the server is under attack.

According to the docs (https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha/blob/master/docs/CONFIG...), you can set three difficulty levels:

MCAPTCHA_CAPTCHA_AVG_TRAFFIC_DIFFICULTY

MCAPTCHA_CAPTCHA_PEAK_TRAFFIC_DIFFICULTY

MCAPTCHA_CAPTCHA_BROKE_MY_SITE_TRAFFIC_DIFFICULTY

It isn't proprietary [0]. There is a matrix channel [1] for the project to ask questions.

[0] https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha

[1] https://matrix.to/#/@realaravinth:matrix.batsense.net

I have mainly name and email fields in the newsletter signup and there is no verification. Then I manually blacklisted all the bots in the email service Listmonk.

Listmonk – An open-source alternative to Mailchimp just released version 3. It’s great as a stand-alone newsletter. Also seems like a low lift for capturing leads for side projects.

Here is another great self hosted solution that I came across. Really high performance (written in Go). No affiliation but well done open source product.

https://listmonk.app

When I searched for this I had a very hard time finding a right answer because all the results were SEO blogs advertising their newsletter services (Mailchimp, Convertkit, etc.), which is not the same thing.

So I wrote this overview covering all the options I found. Additional input is welcome.

Even though Listmonk seems like the best free & open source option, there aren't many guides for it and the documentation is quite limited. So [I've been having trouble getting it running on a CentOS server](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/issues/1004#issuecomment-1...).

It's a shame that it seems to be used by thousands of people but almost no one bothers to create guides or improve the docs.