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

Sometimes 5, S and 9 can be hard, but if you get it wrong then the captcha will be shown again with slightly different colors. That mostly helps. But if the text captcha does work for you then it's great. Have fun with this mod!

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I tried 3 or 4 times before I realized it wasn't a 5 or an S but a 9. I simply don't want to frustrate my users that way.

So far the text CAPTCHA has worked beautifully. I've had zero spam (down from anywhere between 5 and 30 a day) in the past 2-3 days and have had 1 legitimate forum post, which isn't bad for a forum I've ignored for the past few months due to spam.

In a word: Beautiful.

Well you could limit the module from generating those letters/numbers...

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-=[ Panu ]=-

I have problems with the settings on a phorum 5.0.19.

Module is turned on in the admin, I go to the settings, change some of them and hit "Save". Then I get

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: phorum_admin_okmsg() in /home4/www/b10/faltboot/forum/mods/spamhurdles/settings.php on line 32

What can I do? The phorum is quite "hacked", so upgrading isn't that simple.

Thanks & cheers,
Marian

Upgrading would be the only way though (and a smart thing to do anyway). This module was neither written for, nor tested on Phorum 5.0.x.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I tried using this mod, but spammers are still finding a way to post messages. The spammers are posting messages anonymously. I've tried every possible option of the captcha and none seem to work. It's either a really good bot or a really bored spammer.

Has anyone else run into holes in this mod?

So far I haven't heard of any. Some people even report that the mod stopped the spam 100%. Manual spamming would always be a problem though. If that is the case, then there's not much you can do using any CAPTCHA system. You could try and see where the spam is coming from. If it's all coming from the same (group of) IP-address(es), then block those from accessing Phorum.

Looking at your server's access logs might indicate if these spams are posted from bots or by humans.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I don't know if this is the most appropriate place for this post, but I think may be of some interest for the active members of this thread. Wile following some links alerting about a sql injection for an other application, I discovered this

http:_//retrogod.altervista.org/phorum5_local_incl_xpl.html

I didn't test it, but it looks like an injection attempt. Please take care of the "_" sign I placed after "http:" as I don't want it transforms the url in a link and the phorum site points links to such directions.

This is of no relevance for this thread at all. Also, this security problem was fixed in Phorum 5.1.15 (as a matter of fact, the main reason for that release was this fix). So those who run 5.1.15 or later are safe.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I got this err msg

Warning: mkdir(/tmp/58c47d2d1fa77e6876a5b2f7adc9c68f/mod_spamhurdles/9ef5): 
Too many links in /my_absolute_root_to_phorum/cache.php on line 147

The thread has about 17 level, and displaying is tuned to "thread vue". The err msg appears in the reply_form just after "the subjet field and and my signature box" and before the "Spam prevention message and code field", also it is replicated a dozen of times, adding at each time a level in the cache

9ef5/7762
9ef5/7762/1f3c
9ef5/7762/1f3c/eed2 and so on...

then it ends by

Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource 
   in /my_absolute_root_to_phorum/include/cache.php on line 98
Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource 
   in /my_absolute_root_to_phorum/include/cache.php on line 99

CAPTCHA method used is "code drawn using javascript"
The error message doesn't appear in other smaller threads.
As we can see the number of "links" (I suppose it means number of level linked posts to the thread) tries to make as many direcrories in the cache structure. Is this really necessary ?
Added to above:
The error doesn't seem to apply only in trees with many posts or levels, but also in a case with only 4 replies in 2 levels. Here its is:
Warning: fopenWarning: fopen(/tmp/58c47d2d1fa77e6876a5b2f7adc9c68f/mod_spamhurdles/2fb4/891e/0f3b/df75/af4e/9a64/5edd/85f4/data.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /my_absolute_root_to_phorum/include/cache.php on line 97



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2006 07:52AM by milos.