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Captcha for registration

Sebrian

Sebrian

Freebooter
Storm Modder
As the title suggests, could we implement a Captcha or something for the registration form, as bots and spammers are getting quite out of hand lately... :D
 
Seems we're doing something right; if we're drawing such increased attention!

But indeed, not a bad idea. As much as I like the Gummi Bears, at the very least I'd want to see here some pirate Gummi Bears.

I forwarded your suggestion to our webmaster @DH27 .
Maybe he can implement something with "please select all CANNONS" or something. :rofl
 
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Gummies are attacking again! :pirates I have no idea how they got past registration, no way someone is manually creating these accounts, or are they that smart... do androids dream of electric sheep ?!
 
Sebrian said:
Gummies are attacking again! :pirates I have no idea how they got past registration, no way someone is manually creating these accounts, or are they that smart... do androids dream of electric sheep ?!
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Indeed, I'd hoped to report the first day without spammers; instead, they're still lining up to be zapped. And that one is another "nally" variant, of which I'd previously zapped two last Friday. So either they're manually registering with similar names, or it's a bot that can get past the captcha.

Pieter Boelen said:
Seems we're doing something right; if we're drawing such increased attention!

But indeed, not a bad idea. As much as I like the Gummi Bears, at the very least I'd want to see here some pirate Gummi Bears.
Click to expand...
Merely existing is enough to draw the attention of spammers.

The gummies being spamvertised do not appear to be Gummi Bears. As for pirate Gummi Bears, try this one. :rpirate
 
Were these accounts created yesterday after I enabled the Questions and Answer captcha?
 
Grey Roger said:
Indeed, I'd hoped to report the first day without spammers; instead, they're still lining up to be zapped. And that one is another "nally" variant, of which I'd previously zapped two last Friday. So either they're manually registering with similar names, or it's a bot that can get past the captcha.
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Indeed must be...
And so the mystery deepens. :facepalm

Grey Roger said:
Merely existing is enough to draw the attention of spammers.
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To some extent, yes.
And yet, sometimes we go prolonged periods of time with hardly anything at all.

Grey Roger said:
The gummies being spamvertised do not appear to be Gummi Bears. As for pirate Gummi Bears, try this one. :rpirate
Click to expand...
OOoh, MUCH more better! :rofl
Cheers, matey. :cheers
 
I implemented hcaptchas now (those with images to select from). I looked for a setting regarding the images that are to be used, but they are randomly generated and I can't change anything about them.
 
Try this experiment. Log out and delete cookies from "piratesahoy.net". Click the "Register" button. Click the "Verify" button. You get a 3x3 grid of pictures and are asked to click on all that contain a particular type of object (plane, train, etc.). Regardless of what is displayed, click five squares - all four corners plus centre. This is wrong, so you'll be asked to try again. Click the same five squares. You're asked to try again. And so on. See how many times you have to do this before it gives up and says you're human. It declared me human after four such tries. A second attempt took a bit longer, it declared me human after six tries.

Note: I didn't fill in a username or try to actually register after "passing" the test. So I can't be 100% certain that it would let me register while pretending to be a Cylon.
 
I lowered the difficulty of the captcha to the lowest level. Usually there are two to three 3x3 grids that you have to go through in order to succeed. I don't really like the captchas that require so much work, so I figured that this level of security might already be enough to keep the spammers away.
 
They are getting angry lads... 3 in a row today, usually was just 2 of them, i still refuse to believe that this could be a real human being doing this :D
 

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I upped the difficulty of the captcha. Funnily enough it looks like it already caught 62 bots/spammers since its initialization yesterday.
 
Funnily enough, I saw some of those that actually mentioned whether they're scams just a few minutes ago :rofl.
I would have seen more, but they oh so urge you to go to their site, which I am not doing even though I am running Linux and they probably didn't make whatever they want to do work on that.
If however someone's done what I won't do, and it happened to be a tech support scam, we could contact someone who thwarts those scammers, and they could do the same.
 
Just zapped another gummy spammer. This one was a "sally", possibly "nally" after an upgrade.

I also tried re-running my experiment to repeatedly fill the corners plus centre square. It took longer but still eventually succeeded. This is presumably because the captcha now asks you to fill in two sets of squares.
 
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Just zapped another "sally". This time I checked the IP addresses used by the spammer - two of them, both in India. Hereafter, this group of spammers will be known as Sweat Shop Sally. :p
 
Cleaned two accounts today too. It indeed seems like there is at least partially a human that makes them since they get passed the tests.
 
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