Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

mac — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:29:00 -0400

Sorry abou that. I'll post there.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Thomas Seifert — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:03:14 -0400

You know that you just posted in a thread for this module for Phorum 5.1?
I hope that you used the spamhurdles module that is included in the distribution.

Quote

Does this mean it is not is not in the emerald template...?

The emerald template IS the default template and therefore it contains all needed changes.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

mac — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:10:01 -0400

Mmm. Also got this error as reported here above when I upgraded to the latest downloadable version (on version 5.2.18).

Language: HTML
phorum_mod_spamhurdles_tpl_editor_before_textarea(): Can';t determine whether we';re editing a new message

Then I realised I have made so many changes to template files over the years and have rewritten newer template files with older ones without careful checking of what is new in the new template files.. .

So I did a complete new install of 5.2.1.8
Everything is working but this module. No error messages. Sanity check is OK. It simply does not show.

OK, it does now on the registration form.

Language: HTML
For versions 5.1.16 and higher, this code is already in the default  template.

Does this mean it is not is not in the emerald template...?

And is this is what I must add (I seem to remember from the earlier version)

Language: HTML {HOOK "tpl_editor_before_textarea"}
<small>{LANG->Message}:</small>

The above is what we want, not so, and it is there?

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

BritishV8 — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:41:01 -0400

(post removed... I think I have the module working now, maybe.)

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:47:19 -0500

Great to hear that the new version works for you and thanks for reporting back!

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

wawibu — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:05:15 -0500

Hi Maurice,

it works now ! Thanks a lot for your work and the great mod!

Cheers,
Torsten

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 07:04:19 -0500

Please try upgrading to Phorum 5.2.16-RC2. A fully rewritten spam hurdles module is available in that version. I have no idea if that will fix your problem (frankly, I have no idea why you see this error), but I'd rather debug and fix the issue in the new module than in the old one.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

wawibu — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:18:05 -0500

Hi,

I've tried to use this mod to prevent the SPAM registrations for my Phorum, but as soon as I enable the Captcha Function for new user registration I got the following error message:

Warning: mysql_query(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /is/htdocs/xxx/yyyy/DAF_Forum/mods/spamhurdles/db.php on line 72
Warning: mysql_query(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /is/htdocs/xxx/yyyy/DAF_Forum/mods/spamhurdles/db.php on line 72

It is equal which kind of Captcha Code was selected. Below this error message, the Captcha information and icon was shown.

I'm using:
* Phorum version 5.2.15a
* Spam Hurdles (version 1.1.2)

The SQL table was created, but it seams that the script couldn't write any data to this table.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Torsten

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Thomas Seifert — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:10:36 -0400

start with telling us what you are using and doing:
1. the thread you are posting in talks about this module on the really outdated phorum 5.1.x. Which Phorum version are you using? Which version of this module?

2. When do you get this message? What did you do to get it?

3. Did it work before and the message just happened now? What was changed?

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

kooolman — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:50:05 -0400

I have this message :

Quote

phorum_mod_spamhurdles_tpl_editor_before_textarea(): Can't determine whether we're editing a new message

what this ?

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

freedman — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:58:54 -0400

Quote
sheik
I've just checked my Phorum DB and the phorum_spamhurdles table had 14MB of overhead (i.e. wasted space). An OPTIMISE sorted that out, but it might be worth noting in the Readme for this module that such maintenance may be required.

(I've never understood why MySQL isn't clever enough to optimise its own tables, but there you go...)

/\dam

I run this periodically via cron on my servers:
mysqlcheck --all-databases -o # optimize -a analyze -r repair

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

sheik — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:49:19 -0400

I've just checked my Phorum DB and the phorum_spamhurdles table had 14MB of overhead (i.e. wasted space). An OPTIMISE sorted that out, but it might be worth noting in the Readme for this module that such maintenance may be required.

(I've never understood why MySQL isn't clever enough to optimise its own tables, but there you go...)

/\dam

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 03:07:12 -0400

Maybe a post button double clicker? There are people who double click anything on the computer, which will have the message form posted twice to the server. The second post will be seen as spam.

The only way to diagnose, would be by disabling options one by one, until the user has no more problems. Then you found the check that hits te user. After that we can try to find out why it is happening.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

statolith — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 19:47:09 -0400

Nope, the user does not have Javascript disabled. In fact, it's going to be hard to diagnose because he says it only happens maybe every other time he tries to post, and it doesn't seem to be related to anything like content or length of the message.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:34:01 -0400

Does the user have javascript disabled? In that case, the javascript signing check will not work. Disable that check and see if the user can post.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

statolith — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:25:25 -0400

I'm having trouble with (at least) one of my users getting any message he tries to post marked as spam. Spam Hurdles is the only spam module I have installed, so I'm wondering if it's causing this, but I just don't know. Here are my SH settings:

What action has to be taken when blocking a message? Fully block and show an error
Block message forms that are submitted multiple times Enable for all users
Block message forms that are submitted too quickly Enable for all users
Check if an HTML commented form field is submitted Enable for all users
Let the browser sign the message using JavaScript Enable for anonymous users

I realize this isn't much to go on, but does anyone have any ideas?

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:17:50 -0500

The jury will disregard your remarks.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

freedman — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 15:56:31 -0500

my heavens.. I missed a page of messages.. my most sincere appologies, yes it was done and I'm sitting in shame for not having updated already.

I withdraw my question.

:)

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Panu — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 15:38:31 -0500

Quote
freedman
Mourice... any luck moving the captcha stuff into the database?

as far as I remember this was done weeks ago? Or was it something else?

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

freedman — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:49:52 -0500

Mourice... any luck moving the captcha stuff into the database?

I tend to run my servers in pairs, with mysql master-master replication and the filesystems aren't clustered, so they get synced every few minutes. With the captcha stuff on disk, if somoenes browser decides to send them to the second server (round-robin DNS) to submit the login and the first one created the captcha then it doesn't work as well as one might hope :P

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

DavidVB — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:33:16 -0500

An interesting captcha from Microsoft

[research.microsoft.com]

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:13:48 -0500

Thank you! I'll include it in the next release.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

tom_czag — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:36:37 -0500

Czech (win1250) language file ;-)

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

freedman — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:12:46 -0500

Quote
barcino
...our /tmp-partiton was full... not full of data, but all i-nodes have been used...

I'd suggest, especially for tmp which you want to be fast, you use a filesystem with dynamic i-node creation and high-quality journaling.

tmp tends to get used for large numbers of small files, so this is especially important.

my personal preference is to allocate my tmp disk space to swap and then run tmp as a tmpfs -- I've found huge performance improvements with this configuration.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

barcino — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:45:47 -0500

doh! Thought I downloaded it 2 days ago, but info.txt says, it's version 1.06! Guess I had an older version still hanging around... stupid me! :-)

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:31:08 -0500

You're not running the latest version of the mod, are you? The latest version does not use the cache files, but the database instead.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

barcino — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:29:18 -0500

Hm, there *is* a problem with the cached data... Not so much because of its size but its number:

We have a partition of 1 GB fpr /tmp, which is usually quite sufficient. Now we upgraded from Phorum 5.0.20 to Phorum 5.1.19 and switched from MathCapthca to Spam-hurdles. After 2 days our /tmp-partiton was full... not full of data, but all i-nodes have been used... I guess espacialle the above mentioned point of spiders/robots crawling through a big forum, all messages one by one, will generate quite a lot of files/directories ... at the moment, we just have to stop to use spam-hurdles, keeping me thinking about an unexpensive solution (changing partition sizes is *not* unexpensive in this definition ;-))... "purge expired cache data" is running and running and running... doesn't seem to do much, as number of used i-nodes doesn't change... (?)

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Maurice Makaay — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:55:45 -0500

Quote

This may be a solution, even if it is not a bot but a spammer imitating a bot, writing will not be possible.

A spammer imitating a bot would get a closed thread and cannot answer the post for that reason. Whether a capthca would be generated is something that's up to the Spam Hurdles module. I'll have to look into that to make sure that it skips that step on closed threads (maybe it already does so, but I can't remember putting that in the code).

Quote

will be still indexed by the bots ?

Sure, why not? The threads are closed, which means that replying is no longer possible. The bot is still able to read the pages for the discussion and index its contents. Only the reply option isn't available in that case.

Quote

Don't let to users decide of what developers hesitate to decide themselves!

The dev could always program anything in the way he likes it. But that ignores the fact that there are a lot of users that do want to tweak things. The option I was talking about, really is one that can be used differently based on the type of site you have. Big sites with lots of visitors want the caching, small sites on disk space tight shared hosting environments want no caching. I agree that coding choices are to be made by the dev, but this is a clear example of a choice which would upset users (if not, why is this discussion about disk space going on here in the first place? ;-).

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

Thomas Seifert — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:33:23 -0500

Quote

That means that less data we have and less operations we have, better it is for everyone.

Not really. Less data (which is mostly cached data) leads to more processing / computation needed. so you trade harddisk-space for processing time.
IMO harddisk-space is much less expensive than processing-time and is usually the way to go.
with all that told by you you will be probably one of the guys who will need to disable all caching features which were added to 5.2 as they need addiditional space to give more speed.

Re: Spam Hurdles Module (CAPTCHA's and other anti-spam tools)

milos — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:28:33 -0500

Quote
freedman
I'm happy with the module as it is

Me also but this is not a reason for not improving it. I find the logic of this module much more cleaver than any other solutions I've seen for phorum as well as for the rest of my site, and this is one more reason to see it working the most efficient way it can be. So I think that it must follow the initial principle of Phorum and be powerfull by itself regardless of the available disk space for storing or processors/servers capacity. That means that less data we have and less operations we have, better it is for everyone.

I agree with Sheik that reusing captcha's is a good way to economize a lot of captcha's. In my site I use tree listing of answers, so users have to see messages one by one, which means that, currently, for only one discussion, one user will generate as many captcha's as there are answers in the discussion although he will post only one or two messages.

The other important issue I think is bots activity. As they go through all messages of the forum, they generate a lot of useless captcha's. By one way or an other, this should be avoided to be conform with the principle no useless data, no useless operations.

Quote
makaay
if the user agent field is matching a bot's name. If yes, then it virtually closes down viewed threads, so replying is not available, nor possible

This may be a solution, even if it is not a bot but a spammer imitating a bot, writing will not be possible. Thats what we all want no ? But shall "closed viewed trees" will be still indexed by the bots ?

And a last observation for today concerning data quantity/redondance:

Quote
makaay
If you guys are really this much into shrinking the size of the table for the spam hurdles mod, then I could create an option in the admin interface for configuring whether the object generated data should be cached or not

In general, I don't like thinks with a lot of tuning parameters. Some are usefull, too many they are always a source of errors and misunderstanding. If redundant data can be economized, they must be done in the module's code. Don't let to users decide of what developers hesitate to decide themselves!