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

Discovered that there might be some issues with UTF8 vs. ISO encoding, so I HTML-encoded the special Norwegian characters:

Quote

æ = &ae;
å = å
ø = ø

Attachment deleted by mmakaay; this language file is now part of the distribution



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2007 07:02PM by mmakaay.

Thanks for this contribution, zaera! I'll add the Norwegian translation to the next release of this module.

---

Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I translated to danish.

Attachment deleted by mmakaay; this language file is now part of the distribution



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2007 07:02PM by mmakaay.

Wow, the Spam Hurdles are going international rapidly now! :-)
Thank you too, Pascal!

---

Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Tonight, I finished version 1.1.0 of the Spam Hurdles module. On of the big changes is the use of the database instead of the Phorum caching layer for storing information (to work around the problems that people are having with massive amounts of cache files on busy sites). An extra table has to be created for storing the information. The module should automatically create this table on first access. For upgrading, simply copy the new module files to the server. No additional actions are required.

The new version is uploaded in the first message of this thread. Because of the rather large change in the storage system, I'll leave the 1.0.9 download intact for a while as well, so you can downgrade if there are unexpected problems. Please let me know if this new version works for you.

Here's the changelog for the new version:

    - Added new check: Check if an HTML commented form field is submitted

      If this option is enabled, then an extra form field is added
      to the posting form. However, this form field is embedded within
      an HTML comment block. Because of that, normal web browsers will
      fully ignore this extra field. On the other hand, some badly written
      spam bots will recognize the code as a form field. If such a spam
      bot posts a message including this extra form field, the message
      will be blocked.

      (thanks to Jerome Combaz for suggesting this check)

    - The storage system for server side storage of data for the module
      was changed to use the database instead of the Phorum cache layer.
      The main reason for this was because some users on busy sites ran
      into problems because of the large number of cache files that
      was generated in the cache directory.
      Installation of the required database table should be handled
      automatically by the module.

    - Language support:
      * Fixed typo in the English language file (thanks Adam).
      * Added Danish language support (thanks to Pascal d'Hermilly).
      * Added Norwegian language support (thanks to Gustavo Zaera).

---

Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Thank you very much Maurice. I will try this right now...

Regards,

Yves

it's working like a charm for me.

Ah, great to hear a bit of good news. If it works for you, then it will work for others as well. My only concern was that I had no clean installation lying around to test the upgrade path on. Thanks for reporting.

---

Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

mine wasn't clean either. I was using the old version.
I turned it off in my control panel.. replaced the mods folder, and then turned it on again.

I figured, that way it would do whatever it needed to do to create the DB tables it needed.. I deleted the stuff out of the cache folder and, since the mod seems to produce and validate captcha's and the other things it does, and there's no new stuff in the cache folder, I just presume it's working :).

I didn't go to the trouble of testing whether the 'hidden form' field code works, but I only allow registered users to post so there hasn't been a whole lot of problem with bot posting... I mostly just want to avoid bot registration.

Hi Maurice,

It looks like it's working. There are no more error messages because of excessive file in the cache.

However, I've been looking at the new table and it does fill up quickly. I set up the module this afternoon and it's now over 3000 entries in 8 hours (busy forum, I know...)

Is there a maintenance routine available or embedded into the code for cleaning up that table?

Regards,

Yves