A while ago, I got this email from a friend of mine:

i left a long comment on your starbucks entry, but i got a character wrong in your CAPTCHA, and it told me to click the “back” button and try again. however, when i did that, all the entries in the form were BLANK! I LOST MY COMMENT! AIEEEE!!!!!

This is a problem, because I don’t like evil in any form. Particularly in my forms. I’ve been really busy, but spent about thirty minutes poking around at the bBlog internals (looks I chose a bad horse: the bBlog project seems to have died!) and made the field values sticky on an error with the captcha submission.

If you are interested in the changes, here is a diff file that you can apply via patch:
patch -b bBlog.class.php bBlog.captcha.diff against an unmodified version 0.7.6 bBlog.class.php from the bBlog install.

Once that is done, you have to modify your template to add value=”{$commentFieldPosterXXX}” where XXX is some value. The only exception is {$commentreplytitle} which remains the same.

Here is the relevant portion from my template:

<div class="formleft">Comment Title</div>

<div class="formright"><input name="title" size="80" type="text" id="title" value="{$commentreplytitle}"/></div>

<div class="clear"> </div>

<div class="formleft">Your Name: </div>

<div class="formright"><input name="name" size="80" type="text" id="author" value="{$commentFieldPosterName}"/></div>

<div class="clear"> </div>

<div class="formleft">Email Address: </div>

<div class="formright"><input name="email" size="80" type="text" id="email" value="{$commentFieldPosterEmail}"/>

          Make Public? <input class="checkbox" name="public_email" type="checkbox" id="public_email" value="1" checked=\

"checked"/></div>

<div class="clear"> </div>

<div class="formleft">Website: </div>

<div class="formright"><input name="website" size="80" type="text" id="url" value="{$commentFieldPosterWebsite}" />

          Make Public? <input class="checkbox" name="public_website" type="checkbox" id="public_website" value="1" chec\

ked="checked" /></div>

<div class="clear"> </div>

<div class="formleft"><img src="/randomImage.php" alt="verification image"><br>Image verification:</div>

<div class="formright"><font color="red">{$commentFieldError}</font></div>

<div class="formright"><input name="verification" type="text" id="verification" /></div>

<div class="clear"> </div>

<div class="formleft">Comment:</div>

<div class="formright"><textarea name="comment" cols="80" rows="10" wrap="VIRTUAL" id="text">

{$commentFieldPosterComment}</textarea></div>

Of course, you also need to follow the relevant directions in my original post on adding a captcha for comment protection in bblog. But it looks like things are working well for me here.

The diff patch is here.