Shoutbox

DZ, how about adding some numerical equation CAPTCHA to the registration which would help prevent bots from registering

Why equational captchas when recaptcha is a great one?
By the way

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Originally posted by blessedguy
Why equational captchas when recaptcha is a great one?
By the way

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I definitely agree with recaptcha, it's solving our problems over at msgstuff, but it's WDZ so... .

people moan about the forum being quiet/dead, yet then want to get rid of the only users posting.............

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Originally posted by toddy
people moan about the forum being quiet/dead, yet then want to get rid of the only users posting...

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If we would want to read spam we would be monitoring the junk mail folder all day.

I've never seen evidence of a spambot problem here... if the spammers we get are in fact bots, they suck and they're horribly inefficient.

I think it's actually just humans who do the spamming manually, probably getting paid peanuts, Mechanical Turk-style.

I personally don't like recatchpa, I find those ones extremely hard to read sometimes.

Although other ones similar to it, sure =), but I don't think it's a top priority. *cough*

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Originally posted by Nagamasa
I personally don't like recatchpa, I find those ones extremely hard to read sometimes.

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Nothing a refresh can't fix

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Originally posted by SonicSam

quote:

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Originally posted by Nagamasa
I personally don't like recatchpa, I find those ones extremely hard to read sometimes.

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Nothing a refresh can't fix

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Then it failed to do what it is suppose to do, looking at it in one way...

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I agree on that reCaptcha (and many many similar ones) is shit comment. Why on earth does it need to be so difficult to read it for a human?

Many of those captcha systems seem to forget that it is dead easy for a OCR to see the difference between colors, so why bother with that to begin with. Or what's up with colored backgrounds? Completely useless. And as for backgrounds with lines etc: if there is one thing an OCR can reconize easily it are those things (grids, lines, etc).

Second, as for stuff like reCaptcha, a problem they have is that their letters are extremely big and thick and therefor can be recognized relativly easly compared to a more normal font but with random pixels in the background. So, ofcourse they need to distort the words so much. As for using words: not everybody speaks english and thus can reconize the proper words.

I've been using an extremely simply numerical captcha since a while now and had no problems with spambots at all. Although it isn't for a massive forum like this with a lot of exposure. Nevertheless, I have tested that simple captcha system with several of the popular (and bigger professional) OCR packages and to my big surprise none that I've tested can reconize the numbers properly, eventhough it seems rather simple to do it for this kind of extremely simple captcha:

And if there is one which can recognize the numbers (I have no doubt their is some package though, but didn't come across it yet), who would bother with it anyways, that's for the site it is used on though. Maybe someone will bother when it would be used on such a big forum as this....

anyways... blahblah... just ranting before going to sleep.. most captchas of today are shiit... there, I said it... some bullshit post from me (hmmm... maybe there should have been a captcha before posting... would have prevented me from posting this as I wouldn't have bothered )

I generate 2 random numbers and just print it to the screen

php code:

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        <div id="content">
            <h1>Verify Your Account</h1>
            <cite>Welcome <?=$strUsername;?></cite>
            <?
                $n1 = @rand(1, 10);
                $n2 = @rand(1, 10);
                $_SESSION['answer'] = $n1+$n2;
            ?>
            <p><? if ($error == true) echo "An incorrect answer was provided. Please try again.<br />"; ?>
            Please verify your account by answering the following question.</p>
            <form id="verify" action="<?=$url;?>verify/<?=$_GET['v'];?>/" method="post">
                <div>
                    <label for="answer"><?=($n1).'+'.($n2).'=';?></label>
                    <input type="text" name="answer" id="answer" />
                </div>
                <div>
                    <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Submit" />
                </div>
            </form>
        </div>

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But this is also done after the user registers, gets an email verification link then they are prompted with this.