Cantr II Discussion Forum

I checked the members list in ascending order to see how many spammers we've gotten lately and was surprised to notice that the newest user had changed between me moving from the main page to the list. But anyway, I think there is a bug involved because the user Inez seems legitimate and no one could write over a hundred thousand posts that fast. So how's this possible?

Joined: 18 May 2033
Total posts: 100001

Also I don't think the spam guard is working because we've gotten 29 new users today, with 0 posts, most likely spammers.

Check how many hits there are for CAPTCHA killer online. If there's any chance of implementing a checker that requires logical thinking and not just pattern recognition, we should implement it.

http://www.nadacollar.com/2007/08/did-t ... e-captcha/

Edit 4 or something: And I would have the highest post count if it weren't for that weird case.

Sorry to go off topic, but (a) Do you have to go through that Capcha thing to get on the forum now? (b) Is there an alternative way of subscribing?
(c) Has someone really come up with a way round the disgusting things... if so, where?

There was poblem with forum database once, user Inez has been deleted due to unknow reason. I have restored it, but I didn't remeber how many post does she have, so I just entered 100000

I noticed this Inez case too and a quick search for her posts revealed a number of 33 (if I remember right).

Image based capchas are silly. There are plenty of other ways to do it. I have bad eyesight and a big screen and zooming the graphics makes them way too fuzzy. it's basically a one in three chance I get one right each try, very frustrating.
There doesn't appear to be any good pphBB captchas though, I tried searching for mods on their forum and found nothing.

tiddy, there is this program that claims that they can bypass CAPTCHA checks. The address is http://www.captchakiller.com/ though I don't know how well it works, but it claims that it's meant to help blind people.

I read that some sites may pay people to solve CAPTCHAs and also that there would be free porn sites where you have to pass a CAPTCHA in order to see the pics, but that it would in fact forward a check from Yahoo or Hotmail and when you submit the right answer, they use it to create a spamming account. I think that one way of avoiding this would be including the name of the site in the CAPTCHA and maybe the text that if you see this on some other site than the one mentioned in the picture then you are being abused by spammers. Machines cannot read images if the letters are overlapping or if there is noise, so often people are making CAPTCHAs too hard to read even for real people when in fact they are not cracked by a program, they are cracked by idle people looking for free porn. Just think about it, you don't even have to pay the models if you kidnap them from some poor country. You take some pictures, put them up on a website, request a CAPTCHA for each image, and there may be several customers requesting the same pictures so you can use them several times. Granted that hosting costs money but... if they are able to send loads of spam from trusted hosts, they are likely to make some money with it.

I don't think any hackers are interested in our site, so we're being attacked by generic bots. In this case very simple and very easy solution is to extend registration form by additional checkbox which needs to be checked by user in order to complete the registration. I use this solution on few of my own sites and it rids off bots completely.

But bots might check everything... One option is including a hidden field titled name or email and renaming the actual name or email field as something irrelevant, since bots tend to fill out hidden fields. But this might confuse blind people.

So far they don't check everything, as my other sites shows. If they will, we might check the checbox initially and require to uncheck it.

Here's an example:
http://www.vive.zetonet.pl/phpBB2/profi ... greed=true
I added the last checkbox. I have had zero bots registered since then.