CAPTCHA Alternatives

Talk about stuff specific to the site -- bugs, suggestions, and of course praise welcome.
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onehundredandtwo
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CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by onehundredandtwo »

*CAPTCHA Broken in phpBB 3.0*

Is MozillaZine ever going to do anything about CAPTCHA being broken to prevent spam on the board?

Just thought I would make a suggestion to do something about it. :)
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by Guest »

Loudnoise here. The CAPTCHA isn't broken as far as I can tell. That painful little devil is hanging out at the bottom here.
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onehundredandtwo
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by onehundredandtwo »

Sorry, wrong terminology.

Spambots are now able to get past the current CAPTCHA, will MozillaZine do anything about it to stop spam registrations?
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LoudNoise
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by LoudNoise »

Ah, well no. We are great believers in making our users suffer. We think it will make them stronger. :)

That said, the bots haven't broke it yet. If you don't believe me see viewtopic.php?t=598299 . We are getting the attention of our Admins to beef that and other things up.
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onehundredandtwo
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by onehundredandtwo »

LoudNoise wrote:Ah, well no. We are great believers in making our users suffer. We think it will make them stronger. :)
:lol:

I guess if it isn't a real problem in the first place then there isn't any point.
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James
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by James »

The amount of spam we get right now pales in comparison to say three years ago.
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steviex
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by steviex »

Oh, yes... And then the Post Bomber arrived .......
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein

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Ngamer01
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by Ngamer01 »

You could nuke this problem once and for all by replacing CAPTCHAs with questions a human, but not a bot, would know. Questions like "Who makes Firefox?" for example. The beauty of questions is if by chance a bot master rigs a bot to bypass your question, you can just switch out the question to bust up their plans. >=D

So really the only thing that would be left to fear when using questions is live human spammers. But IP ban hammers work pretty well against them. =D
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makaiguy
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by makaiguy »

Ngamer01 wrote:You could nuke this problem once and for all by replacing CAPTCHAs with questions a human, but not a bot, would know. Questions like "Who makes Firefox?" for example. The beauty of questions is if by chance a bot master rigs a bot to bypass your question, you can just switch out the question to bust up their plans. >=D

So really the only thing that would be left to fear when using questions is live human spammers. But IP ban hammers work pretty well against them. =D


I agree, to an extent. The English-language bbs I administer went to such a system a couple of years ago and it worked wonders. An actual person can register and post, but the automated bots have disappeared. The hard part is coming up with questions that ANY human should be able to answer. That gets much more difficult here where we get posters from all over the world, and their English skills may be very limited. I wouldn't count on ANY level of familiarity with the program or its origins as a basis for the questions, either.
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steviex
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by steviex »

Also, we might have cultural problems....

Consider the question ...
'What shaped ball is Football played with ?? '

I would answer 'Round' .. Doug would answer 'Oval' .... :)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein

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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by makaiguy »

I've tried such questions as "How many legs does a cat have?" and "How many times does the letter A appear in the word MESSAGE?" and "Which of these is a color: RED, HOUSE, TREE?" but this still requires some degree of English comprehension and vocabulary.
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What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away - Doobie Brothers
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LoudNoise
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by LoudNoise »

By the way, this is my personal fav http://recaptcha.net/ . Don't know how good it is at blocking but it is a cool idea. The audio version is also surprisingly easy to use.
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James
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by James »

Ngamer01 wrote:Questions like "Who makes Firefox?"

I bet the answer half of the time by new Firefox users would be Firefox and not Mozilla.
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Ken Saunders
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by Ken Saunders »

I bet the answer half of the time by new Firefox users would be Firefox and not Mozilla

No, no, no. They'd say Google. :)

By the way, this is my personal fav http://recaptcha.net/


That one is the best that I've come across to work with as a person with very crappy eyesight. Ever try a Google audio CAPTCHA?
It reminds me of when I was teen playing records backwards to hear all of the subliminal messages. Turns out that the messages were in my mind from the "experimental" unfiltered non-tobacco things that I was smoking.

reCAPTCHA is also great because I can zoom in as much as I need to and hit refresh as many times as I'd like to get a new CAPTCHA to solve.

As far as how effective they are against spam? I can ass-u-me that they work rather well otherwise so many sites and services wouldn't be using them.
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makaiguy
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Re: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Post by makaiguy »

Ken Saunders wrote:As far as how effective they are against spam? I can ass-u-me that they work rather well otherwise so many sites and services wouldn't be using them.

Never underestimate human ingenuity when nefarious motives are involved. The bad guys found ways to break (as in 'break a code') earlier CAPTCHA versions for vBulletin, phpBBS, and others, such that bots could register and post without human intervention. You can bet that some of the current generation CAPTCHAs have already been compromised and the bad guys are working hard to break the others.
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Win10 64bit: FF 115.0.02 64bit, TB 102.12.0 32-bit ║ Android 13/10: FF 115.2.0/115.0.1 ║ No TB for Android available, dammit!
What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away - Doobie Brothers
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