Current SMF Verification feature takes ages?

Started by sirtbhopal, October 16, 2017, 03:10:50 AM

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sirtbhopal

Experts..... Can't SMF use any other verification feature instead of the current ones.

It takes ages to get the post reply verified plus sometimes it gets to annoying....

The text based verification is also good option to have.....

Please comment....

Looking

You can choose different options, it all depends on what you want. One good verification question can be better than 5 others.

Shambles


Steve

Other methods are being discussed but for now it will remain what it is to prevent spamming and unproductive posts.
DO NOT pm me for support!

Kindred

Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Just Another Member

I actually joined a file download site just because the damned new Google "find all the cars" etc. method is so damned annoying. I wish Google would get with it and find another method.

Part of my problem is many of the images are ambiguous (like find the boats) and also I'm partially color blind and have difficulties seeing some of the images.

One time I had to just give up because I couldn't prove I'm a human. :(

Arantor

That system that you're talking about is actually used to improve the data on Google Maps by being able to identify the things Google isn't so sure about with its machine learning.

Just Another Member

Arantor, that is quite interesting. I'd like to hear more if you want to type more.

What would be strange/exciting is if the whole system is heuristic! In other words, let it train itself! :)

I found it odd that sometimes street names on signs were obviously obliterated.

Heck, it makes no nevermind to me now. I was just trying to get over the 10 post hump and become a full member so I could post meaty topics instead of posting la ti dah replies to gain 10 posts.

I'm sorry about that but you create an obstacle course of hoops for new members to jump through, a grrl like me just does the dog training trick until she gets her way.

Now that I'm a general member I sympathize with others but just in an academic way now. I made the grade. Suzy always makes the cut.

Arantor

Well, the original reCAPTCHA when Carnegie Mellon University set it up was for crowd-sourced reading of old books. You'd have two words, one it knew, one it didn't and expect you to type both - the idea being that collectively it would take the most common answer as the 'correct' word.

The last iteration would show you a street number and ask you to translate it. Partly so that you couldn't easily do things like OCR on it and partly to provide some backing for Google's neural network stuff.

This iteration is reliant more on images that are sourced out of Street View and I wouldn't be surprised if this were training for self-driving car materials.

The risk with self-training networks is that once a flaw is introduced, it is compounded (a neural network variation of the butterfly effect)

Just Another Member

I wrote the best CAPTCHA I know of. It was for my buddy's vB forum and it relies on mouse usage which itself is a big impediment against 'bots using scripted attacks, and it also relied on color perception. It used an image map and depended on clicking the right colors. It worked well on vB although I never translated it into an SMF mod package. He used it to cover file download URLs and prevent them from being robo-searched.

Even if I translated into my site how much trouble would spammers go to for just two sites?

That's the flaw with Google anything. Too many people using it, too attractive to not crack.

I would like to hook up with mod authors or teams on your site who are selling mods. I have a lot of good ideas and working code for mods you never thought of (or dreamed of) but I don't want to be an SMF mod author.

Arantor

I'm glad to know that it would block me from your site too. And it would block a number of people I know who don't use a mouse, it would likely block people who use mobile devices depending on how you implemented it, and it would block people using text readers because of disabilities.

And if you base it on colour perception, you risk alienating a further percentage of people who are colour blind.

Just Another Member

Quote from: Kindred on December 23, 2017, 07:56:24 PM
Except that you clearly did not read all of his posts as he has tried to do both of those, based on our suggestion to do the same thing....   I know that you were trying to get your post count up, but please read the entire thread before posting like this.

Please make it less difficult for non-spammers to join your forum. You reward posts like mine.

Just Another Member

 Yep you got me just right. Guilty! No mouse and you are out of here. No color perception and you are out of here. I think mobile devices would handle it though. But, how many mobile devices have places to store files?  None I know of. I am on an iPad right now and if I were to try to download a file I have no idea where it would go.  I hope it wouldn't go up my skirt, LOL! ;)

That Google thing is just nasty! I'm glad I was on the laptop when I tried to pass that one, and I failed dozens and dozens of times before I finally made it through 10 posts.

Well never mind, I made 10 posts so now I don't have to worry about it anymore!

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Pretty much any mobile device not starting with an i will have dedicated storage space for files.
Slava
Ukraini!
"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

Arantor

There are browsers on iPhone/iPad that can download files just fine - just not Safari. Though even then it depends on the file: pictures, PDFs etc. can be downloaded.

But it's also a reminder that that there are always caveats to any solution.

Arantor

#15
Quote from: Susan Addams on December 23, 2017, 09:54:18 PM
Please make it less difficult for non-spammers to join your forum. You reward posts like mine.

I don't think you realise how big the spam problem is here.

Just Another Member

It's also a reminder that there are probably never any solutions that work in all situations all the time.

There remains the fact that the fewer sites that use any CAPTCHA the less reason hackers have to crack it because the payoff is not worth it.

The site my CAPTCHA went into is the second largest adult site on the Internet. The user base is almost 100% desktops. The owner of the site is my mentor. He has given me countless step-by-step instructions on setting up servers, convinced me nginx is better than Apache, helped me through every difficulty I've encountered. I wrote the CAPTCHA code for him just to return the favor, yet when we got it working he sent me $100 in BTC just as a tip! I never expected anything except to return the favors he had given me.

You surely understand that Google is designed to work in many, most or all environments. My CAPTCHA was designed for a specific audience, a specific user base, and it works so well that he is still using it years later to protect his file host info from being skimmed. In the end it met its goal: it works.

I' don't know how mobile friendly your site is. It was difficult to use from my iPad but not impossible, particularly considering I was voicing my posts, not typing them. And it was helpful that I could "unpinch" to expand screen areas and see more closely what I was doing.

I don't generally get on forums from bed, I usually use that quality time for shopping at Amazon, LOL! :)

But still, site was usable from my iPad. I love iPads so much I have two of them, both sizes. I was on my mini 4 last night. It worked. That's all that counts. It got the job done, your site got the job done.

Just Another Member

Quote from: Arantor on December 24, 2017, 04:51:30 AM
I don't think you realise how big the spam problem is here.
Take another think. I do realize, yet you won't give me credit for realizing it.

Just also give me credit that I had the determination to convince you I am not a spammer, and I had to jump through the hoops you designed to prove it. Yes I made a bunch of low quality posts. I admit it. I just wanted to break the 10 post barrier that was preventing me from accessing full functionality on the forum.

Now that I have it my future posts will be higher quality. It will be up to your opinion to decide if I deliver.

But please don't blame me for the low quality posts I had to put up to make it through the hoops and prove I'm not a spammer.


Hey, I wrote a mod that allows me to ban entire countries! :) I can't help if some country sends me more spammers than members. I think for 5 countries everything on my server is just a black hole for them, no response, just a connection that shuts down when their browser reaches its limit. That's what I do with countries with high spammer to quality member ratios.

Arantor

Even with the multiple measures that are here, there are new spammers literally every day. I've seen cases where a single spammer has gotten through and made 50 posts before anyone banned them.

And that's nothing to do with the 10 posts for the profile.

You'll also note that we can't just black-hole countries the way you do, nor really follow any of the methods that might work for you.

Just Another Member

No, you can't do a lot of things I do, hehe! ;) For one, I doubt you would look good in makeup! :P

I have a specialty forum that caters to mostly English speakers. When I get a bunch of spam from say Ukraine or Moldova, I see I have no members from there, so buh bye.

I understand SMF is multi-lingual, and by the way I complement the way you handled it with the $txt[] system. I learned a lot of code tricks writing mods for my own site. (I work part time as an IT contractor writing corporate apps.) Now all my PHP content delivery systems have the $context[] array.

You have nothing to worry about me. Follow me if you wish and see. I'll admit I was steaming a bit after having to run the gamut but I always cool off the next day, and everybody in my book always gets a new chance even if it's their 5th or 9th time they annoyed me. You just poison yourself by taking yesterday's hate or problems or hard feelings into today.

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