Pi in the Sky

Kitten Auth for phpBB

Posted on May 23rd, 2007 at 10:05pm by Pi.
Categories: Personal, Development.

Well, the phpBB captcha experiment was a total success. Success in the sense that I discovered that phpBB’s embedded captcha is total crap. I’ve been receiving more spam with the captcha activated than without it. Funny, uh? Spambots must be optimized for finding this captcha nowadays, and maybe they freaked out when they didn’t find it. Now that it’s there, they’re happy. Just yesterday, I deleted ten spam users…

So instead of going to the second step of my experiment, installating a more sophisticated captcha (I chose freeCap for this), I jumped on the third and last step. I think that a new captcha will lower the spam volume, but not eliminate it. I’m confident that phpBB KittenAuth will do the job fine.

Actually I just installed it, and tested it briefly, on my hacked/modded phpBB 2.0.22 installation. It works, and I really think that I will have to wait a loooong time until spam appears in the board again. I also noticed how crappy the code is; I should install phpBB fresh, and only apply attachMOD, KittenAuth and my Eldondedenoche skin, to have code which is easily maintainable. But I’m lazy as a cat, so maybe next year. But for now, Renton, you’ll have no more “buggies”.

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