[Toolserver-l] CAPTCHA can be required for logins from toolserver hosts

[Michael Peel]

Is this something that an en.wp admin can solve, or does it need developer intervention?

Mike

On 15 Jun 2010, at 19:54, Carl (CBM) wrote:

> At the moment, logins to enwiki from nightshade.toolserver.org are
> throwing up a CAPTCHA. This is easy to check by loading
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin in w3m or another
> browser from that host.  Logins from willow.toolserver.org do not
> require a CAPTCHA at the moment.
> 
> The CAPTCHA requirement makes it impossible for bots to log in via the
> API. The fundamental problem is that bots are run automatically, of
> course. But the API also does not report the CAPTCHA requirement at
> all, so bot developers are given a "WrongPass" error that they have to
> investigate to find that a CAPTCHA is the problem.
> 
> This CAPTCHA situation has happened before, most likely due to some
> erroneous bot on toolserver triggering it. But individual bot
> operators cannot fix it, and so to them it has the same effect as a
> toolserver outage.  Moreover, whatever bot operator caused it probably
> has no way to know it was them.
> 
> It seems like this may take collaboration between toolserver and
> wikimedia to fix, but probably the fix will involve at least some
> change on the wikimedia side. So I have filed a bug at
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23982 to coordinate
> discussion there.
> 
> - Carl
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Toolserver-l mailing list (Toolserver-l at lists.wikimedia.org)
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l
> Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette