Insane new captcha

[Numsgil]

It's been forever since I started manually validating members, and the spam is still trying to get through.  I just upped the ante with an insane new captcha (the numbers you have to type to register).  Took me 4 tries before I managed to get it right.

Everyone should go and try to register a dummy account (I can delete it later) just so they can give me feedback on the difficulty of the captcha.

Hopefully it prevents waves of spam bots and I can stop manually validating every member.

[captcha lab rat]

First time I'm afraid...  

Won't a spam bot just keep trying till it gets it right? I'm sure bots have a lot more patience than we do.

Maybe I got an easy captcha.

{Delete account please}

[captcha lab rat]

How about a couple of recaptcha’s  (helping to digitize books)(and free) – apparently solving captcha’s takes more than 150,000 hours of work each day so we might as well donate the time spent to something useful!

Or you could look into using a non captcha test – what is 1+1 or what colour is the sky or is this picture a cat or dog etc.

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

[Numsgil]

My PHP modding skill is moderate, so I can only do what I know how to do.  Ideally I'd just hook up a goofy font and use letters AND numbers and symbols.

Bots can get through anything, it's all just a matter of how much the scripter wants to.  I'm hoping this will nullify most of the more dubious ones.

[Jez]

That recaptcha thing is a supported whatsit. According to the site it just needs four lines of code to link the site to their test.
If you still get lost of bots running through the latest captcha and I had to look twice at that to get that right, it might be worth trying.

The line through words is apparently one of the best ways to fool bots, (from more than one source) and having an outside site provide the data might be a good way to utilise a larger database.

You are right though, bots will get through almost anything and if the bots can't they farm it out to human operators anyway. Probably never win...  

[Martian]

I think it's nearly impossible.  I gave up after 3 tries. Perhaps a english sentence(s) like:

I have a red ball and two boxes. I place the ball in the box on the left after which I place the left box in the right box. Where is the blue ball?

[Numsgil]

I made the Captcha a little easier.

Jez, I'll look into reCaptcha nd see if I can figure out how to integrate it.  But I didn't see any prebuilt solutions for our Forum software, and PHP is really not my strongpoint.

[Endy]

ReCapatcha does have a bit of a problem with the old english AE combination(probably others also).

[Numsgil]

Okay, I've set recaptcha up on the wiki.  Don't know if anyone noticed it was down for a few days.  It required a massive upgrade of first the server, then the wiki software.  I'm still fixing some things here and there.  If anyone notices anything weird on the wiki (or forum for that matter), be sure to let me know.

[Jez]

Wow, sorry to have been the cause of so much work heading in your direction. Here's hoping it actually has a positive affect.

Damn good work on your part figuring it all out Nums!  

[Numsgil]

No problem, it needed to be done anyway.  We were getting wiki spam suddenly, so that's why I buckled down and set it up.

[Elite]

Looks like the equation stuff is now broken. See here

[Jez]

Has it made any difference to the amount of spam Nums?

[Numsgil]

Between the forum and the wiki, I haven't seen a single spammer get through since I changed the captchas.  Very successful!

[Jez]

Yay! Long may it continue!!