On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: This is great to see. Using your test rig or Special:APISandbox, the API return warns about "Unrecognized parameters: 'wpCaptchaId', 'wpCaptchaWord" when I get the captcha wrong. It seems if the user gets the captcha wrong, there's no explicit indication like captcha-createaccount-fail ('Incorrect or missing confirmation code.'). Instead the API reports a generic Failure result, and the UI presents a new captcha. ConfirmEdit has a getMessage() to provide action-specific text like fancycaptcha-createaccount. Perhaps the API should pass that back as well. Otherwise the UI has to know the details of the captcha in use so it can get a message for it. The current CreateAccount form submission to Special:UserLogin reports many form errors like username exists, password wrong, etc. before it runs the AbortNewAccount hook where ConfirmEdit checks the captcha. But APICreateAccount runs the APICreateAccountBeforeCreate hook early, before it dummies up a login form and calls the same validation. So users will go through the frustration of getting the captcha right before being told their username isn't available or their password isn't long enough. There's also the weirdness that ApiCreateAccount winds up checking the CAPTCHA twice. AIUI, here's the program flow: ApiCreateAccount() Runs APICreateAccountBeforeCreate hook (captcha may abort) Creates a login forms and call $loginForm->addNewaccountInternal(); addNewaccountInternal(): Does a bunch of form validation Runs AbortNewAccount hook (captcha may abort, also TitleBlacklist, AntiSpoof, etc. may abort) If ApiCreateAccount() could tell there was a captcha failure within addNewaccountInternal and could ask the captcha to addCaptchaAPI() to the result, then we wouldn't need the new APICreateAccountBeforeCreate hook. It would be nice if captcha was always checked on its own hook instead of sharing a hook with other extensions. That would let a future validation API run the username past TitleBlacklist and AntiSpoof without getting shot down by the captcha. Cheers, -- =S Page software engineer on E3