I just wanted to point out that if anyone is a user of dynamic questions with questycaptcha as per Jamie Thinglestad's implementation here: http://thingelstad.com/stopping-mediawiki-spam-with-dynamic-questy-captchas/
You may have noticed that recently, the spammers have figured it out and the new user account logs are filling up.
Well, Jamie has updated his solution: http://thingelstad.com/updated-dynamic-questy-captchas/
I've implemented it and so far so good.
Note that to get it to work, I had to change the => to => in the question and answer strings.
Cheers Bill
Without a doubt the original solution by Jamie is awesome. When I implemented it last year I took it a step further. I generated the random string, but also generated a random number of positions to ask in a random order.
Anyone registering would be presented with provide anyone of these random combinations:
Sixth, fourth and ninth Or Fifth and ninth Or First, seventh, third and fourth
160 registrations a day dropped to 8-12 overnight.
I've seen registrations climbing again, 20-30 a day. I've considered randomizing the output of the order with a mix of images of the position names with actual text.
Second, sixth(image), eighth(image), fourth
There will never be a perfect solution. It a fine line between real user usability vs stopping spammers.
Tom
On Nov 7, 2014, at 7:55 AM, Bill Traynor btraynor@gmail.com wrote:
I just wanted to point out that if anyone is a user of dynamic questions with questycaptcha as per Jamie Thinglestad's implementation here: http://thingelstad.com/stopping-mediawiki-spam-with-dynamic-questy-captchas/
You may have noticed that recently, the spammers have figured it out and the new user account logs are filling up.
Well, Jamie has updated his solution: http://thingelstad.com/updated-dynamic-questy-captchas/
I've implemented it and so far so good.
Note that to get it to work, I had to change the => to => in the question and answer strings.
Cheers Bill
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Tom tom@hutch4.us writes:
I've seen registrations climbing again, 20-30 a day. I've considered randomizing the output of the order with a mix of images of the position names with actual text.
Most wikis don't have the benefit of a large, active user base filled with monitors like Wikipedia does, of course, but people thinking about captcha's should know that this came up today on wikitech-l: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/80188
Jamie's answers are generally awesome (as is the Foreground skin), and hopefully this ends some spam for some time. As for the discussion on http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/80188 the problem is, as always with Mediawiki, the software's goals are too tied to Wikipedia (which is understandable, but a problem for those using it outside of it) and my fear is as Wikipedia goes so goes Mediawiki. If captcha is removed from Wikipedia I could see a future were the support for ConfirmEdit dies, which effectively would kill Mediawiki's effectiveness as a good software package. Maybe my fear is unfounded, but the shadow of Wikipedia is very, very large.
I would rather Wikipedia, and Mediawiki, add support for some more interesting approaches to captcha. See: http://www.josscrowcroft.com/demos/motioncaptcha/ (not in production yet, but an interesting captcha answer). http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/80188
On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 8:59 AM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.com wrote:
Tom tom@hutch4.us writes:
I've seen registrations climbing again, 20-30 a day. I've considered randomizing the output of the order with a mix of images of the position names with actual text.
Most wikis don't have the benefit of a large, active user base filled with monitors like Wikipedia does, of course, but people thinking about captcha's should know that this came up today on wikitech-l: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/80188
-- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084
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