Ruby-recaptcha seems be broken or has significant limitation

Rails
1

I’ve installed the ruby-recaptcha gem as instructed here:

http://bitbucket.org/mml/ruby-recaptcha/wiki/Home

Here are the steps that I’ve comleted:

  1. installed the gem
  2. added config.gem ‘ruby-recaptcha’ environment.rb:
  3. modified action_controller.rb

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
include ReCaptcha::AppHelper

  1. modified application_helper.rb like so:

module ApplicationHelper
include ReCaptcha::ViewHelper

The inclusion of the Recaptcha::ViewHelper works. Meaning this tag:

<%= get_captcha(:options => {:theme => ‘clean’}) %>

Renders an image.

However, the controllers are another can of worms:

calls like:

if validate_recap(params, @user.errors) && @user.save

fail with the following message:

NoMethodError (undefined method `validate_recap’ for
#ActionView::Base:0x734b578):

Which tells me that the module is not being mixed into application
controller and not then not inherited.

Does anybody have any ideas? Is ruby-recaptcha a reputable product?