SMF Support > SMF 1.1.x Support

Captcha Code stopping legitimate registration

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hawkman:
I have had Visual Verification System mod 1.2 loaded for years.  Recently (can't be sure how long) it went haywire.  legitimate members say they were repeatedly told they typed the wrong number.  Interestingly, last night I told one of my new moderators this is a great site and that he should register. He said he had to try 7 ties before he could get past the captcha code right here on the SMF Support Forum.  What is up with that ???  Strangely I still get a couple spam registrations a day.

I looked for an updated Visual Verification System mod and the one on the mod page is earlier than the one I have had loaded for years.  How is that possible?  Also the other security mods that present puzzles or clocks seem to say they are compatible with 1.1.10 or 1.1.11 then it jumps to 2.0.1 and 2.0.2  Does anyone know if these work on 1.1.16 ?

Thanks for insight on any of this.  Clearly a forum requires that you get legitimate people in and keep illegitimate registrations out.

MrPhil:
Is your CAPTCHA degree of difficulty set so high that it's easy to misread the graphical text? Temporarily reduce the difficulty and see if you can now register on the first try. There have been scattered reports of CAPTCHA either failing to produce an image, or not accepting input -- I don't recall if there were any real solutions offered.

Note that CAPTCHAs (graphical puzzles) are now almost useless. If spammers aren't using sophisticated new bots that can easily read a CAPTCHA (at least, one that's readable by humans), they're using farms of Third World humans to do the registrations for them. CAPTCHA is passe and is more annoying to real registrants than fatal to spammers; move on to something else. There are mods to ask forum-subject-specific questions (built into SMF 2). There are mods to look up the IP address, email domains, etc. against databases of known spammers. There are mods to forbid links in signatures and posts until a member has a minimum number of posts. I think there may be mods to monitor content of posts and stop those with excessive links or certain keywords.

Any forum, including SMF, needs more "defense in depth" (looking at the characteristics of a member's posts) and less reliance on a "hard shell" trying to stop spammers from registering at all. There are all sorts of tests that can be built into SMF to look for post behavior and characteristics and build a score of likely spam content, and then hide the post until a moderator can look at it. At this time, other than controls on links, the only thing is other members reporting spam and moderators vigorously erasing it and banning offenders.

hawkman:
That is some good feed back MrPhil.  I am using a captcha mod and not stock SMF Captcha and I see no setting for difficulty.  It is only displaying 3 or 4 characters and yet the audio sounds out 5 characters.  I am also surprised that my moderator had to make 7 attempts to register on this forum.

Sounds like 2.x.x has better registration /spam controls.  If so that may be a reason to upgrade.
 

a10gf:
Maybe somewhat out of topic, but my solution was to ditch any captcha, and use only the verification questions mod (with a few forum related questions). No more problems & haven't seen a single unwanted registration since.

hawkman:
Actually your comments are on topic and just the kind of info I need.  Is that compatible with 1.1.16 ?

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