CAPTCHA today

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timmmay

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#139531 12-Feb-2014 09:15

Today when submitting a thread then again editing the first post (5:2 diet thread) I got a catchpa - not the most difficult I've ever seen, but a bit annoying, took a few tries. I've never seen it before. Is this the Cloudflare protection? I'm on an IP6 connection, through a reliable corporate ISP.

freitasm

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#984780 12-Feb-2014 09:17

I've whitelisted AU/NZ through Cloudflare but geolocation via IPv6 is a bit harder it seems.

timmmay

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#984783 12-Feb-2014 09:22

Not sure if it helps, but if you can capture the IP's I use maybe that will help? I don't mind too much, but if you can make it easier, great. Think my connection is through DMZGlobal.

andrewNZ

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#984827 12-Feb-2014 10:07

In my minimal experience with PHPBB (not GZ obviously), CAPTCHA is worthless. Most if not all CAPTCHA types have been cracked now and don't even slow most spambots down.

Q&A type CAPTCHA is infinitely more effective and flexible. They are simple for people to use, and hard for software to answer. When a spambot starts getting past it, you change the Q&A and the spam goes away.
Our forum was getting 20-30 spam posts per hour. We changed to Q&A (new registrations only), and now at most, we get 1-2 per month from people. In 12 months, we've had to change the Q&A once.

Being a bespoke forum, spam probably isn't a big issue, but if you're relying on standard CAPTCHA images to stop spam, you're wasting your time IMO.

timmmay

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#984834 12-Feb-2014 10:11

andrewNZ: Being a bespoke forum, spam probably isn't a big issue, but if you're relying on standard CAPTCHA images to stop spam, you're wasting your time IMO.

Pretty sure it's just a check box in the cloudflare control panel to turn catchpa on.

gundar

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#984842 12-Feb-2014 10:21

I couldn't find the link to the story, but a few weeks ago, I came across a very evil captcha circumvention method.

Basically, a whole lot of Windows PCs picks up this malware that displays a captcha and demands the user solve the captcha or have the PC shutdown immediately. The captchas are harvested from bots that are creating social media accounts. When the bot gets challenged, it redirects captcha requests to the unsuspecting home users to be solved and gets the keystrokes back to continue creating social media accounts that are then sold off to people who need likes or views.

Genius and evil. Not cool, but I had a long chuckle.

freitasm

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#984860 12-Feb-2014 10:32

andrewNZ: Being a bespoke forum, spam probably isn't a big issue, but if you're relying on standard CAPTCHA images to stop spam, you're wasting your time IMO.

We have many, many layers to prevents spam here (blocking certain countries from posting, checking emails and IP addresses with StopForumSpam before account creation and more). The CAPTCHA mentioned here is not part of our software but provided by Cloudflare based on their vast network input.

We have the ability to whitelist entire countries or specific IP addresses and Cloudflare will use data from other services to find compromised browsers, IP addresses and more to prevent them access to sites behind the service.

Thanks to our moderators working around the clock we also remove spam pretty damn quickly.

It's only one layer, but not the only one. We do see a spam post or two over the month. Certainly not as bad as other forums around.