Site update: CAPTCHA at materials found
Posted: Feb 1st, '10, 01:57
Hello everybody,
as our mods and admins had been discussing lately, we are having a serious botter problem here on KofK. As a first step of countermeasures, we were working on a CAPTCHA system.
I hereby announce that for the quest material found in the forums, this new CAPTCHA system is now in place, and so far it seems to be working. Please tell me if you find otherwise.
I honestly hope we don't have to get really nasty on this topic, I personally find our captcha for the registration already rather annoying to take.
[EDIT] Which is the reason why I implemented a completely different type of CAPTCHA question. You are shown five images, and are to click on the one that is described in the text above.
Though I already know how I would write a bot to circumvent our captcha method, I am hoping that since we can easily update the system with new images and questions, I can use this to keep ahead of bot programmers.
Please note that every failure at the CAPTCHA test is logged so we can identify users using bots for collecting, and that we are planning to add similar CAPTCHA measures to some other places as well - posting in the spam forum, for example, though we haven't decided on the exact modalities like how often...
[EDIT] Just in case there are people who don't know what CAPTCHA means, it's an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Thus are all measures called where a task is given to users which are easy for humans to take, but complicated for a computer program to solve, to tell bots and real users apart, such as reading distorted text, identifying an image described with fuzzy text, and so on. There's an article on Wikipedia.
as our mods and admins had been discussing lately, we are having a serious botter problem here on KofK. As a first step of countermeasures, we were working on a CAPTCHA system.
I hereby announce that for the quest material found in the forums, this new CAPTCHA system is now in place, and so far it seems to be working. Please tell me if you find otherwise.
I honestly hope we don't have to get really nasty on this topic, I personally find our captcha for the registration already rather annoying to take.
[EDIT] Which is the reason why I implemented a completely different type of CAPTCHA question. You are shown five images, and are to click on the one that is described in the text above.
Though I already know how I would write a bot to circumvent our captcha method, I am hoping that since we can easily update the system with new images and questions, I can use this to keep ahead of bot programmers.
Please note that every failure at the CAPTCHA test is logged so we can identify users using bots for collecting, and that we are planning to add similar CAPTCHA measures to some other places as well - posting in the spam forum, for example, though we haven't decided on the exact modalities like how often...
[EDIT] Just in case there are people who don't know what CAPTCHA means, it's an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Thus are all measures called where a task is given to users which are easy for humans to take, but complicated for a computer program to solve, to tell bots and real users apart, such as reading distorted text, identifying an image described with fuzzy text, and so on. There's an article on Wikipedia.
