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

An interesting captcha from Microsoft

[research.microsoft.com]

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

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?

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-=[ Panu ]=-

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.

:)

The jury will disregard your remarks.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

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?

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[lalitree.com]

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.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

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.

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[lalitree.com]

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.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

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

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My notable Phorum sites:
Movie Deaths Database - "review comments" system mostly powered by Phorum
Learn Chinese! - integrated forum quiz