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

Thanks Maurice...below script pops up on many post. Will the script you pointed me to also fix this message?


Table 'aska.phorum_user_custom_fields' doesn't exist: select * from phorum_user_custom_fields where user_id in (559,251,1,251)

No, that's something totally different. It tells that the table "phorum_user_custom_fields" is missing on your system. So somehow you did not fully install all Phorum tables or an upgrade of Phorum failed somehow. This is not really related to the mod, so if it's unclear what happened, then please open a new thread in the support section.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I can't seems to see the captcha image during registration any suggestions?
thanks

See this posting in this thread for a possible solution. If that does not work for you, then you'll have to revert to one of the other CAPTCHA types, since something is missing in your PHP setup to produce the images.

I can't really tell what step is going wrong for you, since there's no error message to work with. If you have access to the error log of your webserver, then please check if you can find specific error messages in there. Another thing you could do is view the source of the page and find the full URL for the captcha image in that source (searching for the string "imagecaptcha=" will get you to this URL). Then open that URL directly in your browser. This might show you an error, telling what's going wrong.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

thank you very much!
It's showing now
it's the url in the admin page

Sorry folks it has been fixed and working well
thanks for the support!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/11/2006 10:52PM by psydew.

Hi Maurice,

I have a problem with too many file in the tmp directories. Our Web provider deactivated our Web site today because he said we had too much activities.

I'm not very good with UNIX. What would the command line look like if I wanted to delete every subdirectory that are say 2 hours old (is that enough?) ?

The files that are created at an amazing rate are located here:
/tmp/c9201e61e1a9a3d73c1d97db98ebb87b/mod_spamhurdles/(many sub directories)

Or better, can a Cron job be setup to automatically activate the "Purge expired cash data" function of the module?

Thanks,

Yves

Maurice's anti-spam module is excellent, but the amount of directories and files it creates on any moderately busy site is a huge problem if the administrator doesn't deal with it.

See this thread for a possible solution: [www.phorum.org]

Please note the script in that thread does not work for everybody. I personally had to modify it to use "rm -R" on my nested directories. *** Be careful if you do the same! ***

Maurice, this isn't a criticism, but I honestly think you should stick a huge warning in the documentation for this module about the impact on the cache. My own server has been taken down despite me having a daily cronjob to purge it. It definitely isn't an "install and forget" module.

/\dam

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

the point is simply that this module needs to cache data for the captchas it creates and checks later. if you have many posts coming in through captchas then it will create lots of cached directories.
as there is no facility to run timed jobs in phorum I don't see any way that this mod can clean up on its own.

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Thomas Seifert

The only thing that can be done about this is changing the storage for all cache information to database storage. That is something that is on my list, but my current workload does not allow for doing Phorum development unfortunately. As soon as my workload goes down and I get time to work on the modules, I'll try to find another way to store the data, without using the file cache.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce