Hi guys,
>I have an impossible time with those anti-spam things. I tried to
leave a few comments on a couple of shots and my wife or I
>could figure out what it wanted. Olaf, if there is a trick to it
please let me know off list. Tia Jerry
I must say I'm somewhat amazed by the CAPTCHA challenge being
mentioned as a possible factor for not leaving comments, as it's
nowadays virtually impossible to leave any comment anywhere without
having either a login or CAPTCHA challenge. And, unfotunately, this is
for a good reason, which I call "forum spam". TOPE was also victim of
this about a year ago, and it was SO bad that it would virtually
render my server anything but unreachable. I logged the traffic back
then, and within one week there were tens of thousands of attempts to
inform the world through TOPE of the benefits of viagra and things
'somewhat more explicit', which I shall not repeat over here... :P
The logging results were interesting, the top 10 IP addresses caused
more than 30,000 attempts alone (within a 1 week time span) and the
other tens of thousands of attempts came from a few thousand distinct
other IP addesses, ergo, this spam is bot driven, probably by a spam
virus, trojan or simply manually operated (by legions of Chinese or
East European spammers) backdoors on Windows machines all over the
world. Even as we speak, the machine is still being hammered by
(futile) calls to the name of the script that used to store the
comments. They're directly dropped by my webserver, but it's obvious
that the CAPTCHA challenge is an absolute must, and surely enough all
forum owners will have noticed this too...;)
Sooo, unfortunately the CAPTCHA challenge really cannot go. Some tips
as to the usage: basically one types the comments as one would do
previously, and after clicking the "Leave comments" button, one will
be presented with the challenge (which I calculated using an algorithm
of my own (an interesting combination of MD5 and SHA1 calls), seeded
by the user input, hence being a two step process). I have tried to
make this as simple as possible, by only requiring a 5 digit case
insensitive code, in which no letters/digits occur that can easily be
misread like a '0' vs. 'O'... It then suffices to type the 5 digits in
the "validation value" field, and clicking on the "Store comments"
button.
I hope this clarifies matters enough? :P
Cheers!
Olafo
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