Atlantic Roleplay Community Boards

Halister Marner · **Site Programmer** Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 2217

I installed a new, fancy and psychedelic authorization image (CAPTCHA) for the forums.

Now to see how it works against the spam bots.
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"There are those who dream to escape reality, and there are those who dream to change it."

Halister Marner · **Site Programmer** Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 2217

Update: they are gone!
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"There are those who dream to escape reality, and there are those who dream to change it."

Cal Hurst · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 5:13 pm Post subject:

Bots will get smarter and smarter and be able to recognize words and letters through any attempt at disguising them as time goes on.

But a bot will never be able to tell the difference between a cat, an alligator, a baby, and a ball.

If there's a security system that shows pictures instead of words, I suggest installing that one.
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Halister Marner · **Site Programmer** Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 2217

I haven't seen any for PHPBB yet, I looked for something along those lines before I settled on the one we are using now.

The one we currently use provides a lot of background noise and some very aggressive patterns, I could increase the background noise and texture of the fonts if the bots begin to overcome this one, making it all but impossible for current bot scripts to detect it.

Here is a post on the basic methods bots use to overcome the security system, quite an interesting read.

The one we currently use for example, would provide enough variation so that the cleanup process would detect the lines and background as being letters, or interfering with the interpretation of current letters.
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"There are those who dream to escape reality, and there are those who dream to change it."

Cal Hurst · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 5:23 pm Post subject:

There should be some for PhpBB, I've seen a few. I'll try to find the forum.

I remember this explicitly because I was signing up for a forum for a CS team not too long ago, and one of the random images that popped up was a picture of Richard Simmons, and it asked, "Is this person gay?"

I laughed for a good while.... and then registered.
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Halister Marner · **Site Programmer** Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 2217

Cal Hurst · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 5:42 pm Post subject:

http://bhcore.net/Comedy/yesgay.gif

That's the image

www.tfcgaschamber.com

Their main page, forum link at top. Very Happy

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Halister Marner · **Site Programmer** Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 2217

They are using a modified version of a PHPBB mod, I think I found the one.

The default version compares animals to vehicles, you need to check all the animals to properly verify. The install is overly complicated, but I think I can fix it.

I could change the images to something UO like to keep with the theme of the board, comparing UO monsters to UO characters or something similar.
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"There are those who dream to escape reality, and there are those who dream to change it."

Cal Hurst · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 6:20 pm Post subject:

Ahhhh. Gotcha.

Might be worth the full effort now, rather than scattering the same effort over the next few weeks as the bots get increasingly better at decoding the word-number pictures
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Halister Marner · **Site Programmer** Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 2217

Aye, I'll look into it tomorrow while I'm at work, it looks like it will probably take 3-4 hours to setup, taking new pictures and editing several files.
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"There are those who dream to escape reality, and there are those who dream to change it."

Cal Hurst · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 6:24 pm Post subject:

Even if it is all UO based... I beg you to keep the Richard Summons picture Very Happy

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