Re: Integrated captcha?

On Saturday, Sep 6th 2008 at 11:07 -0000, quoth Alex Teslik:

=>On Fri, 5 Sep 2008 22:38:36 -0700, Alex Teslik wrote
=>> But seriously, any pointers on how to do this would be appreciated. 
=>> MJ2 is a little complex and the Right Way isn't immediately apparent 
=>> after much digging.
=>
=>A couple of people have asked off-list about captcha - sorry I didn't give more details about that. 
=>Basically captcha is the test to differentiate humans from machines. Its usually an image with some 
=>text obscured by lines, dots, and other digital mess. As humans, we can easily differentiate the text 
=>and type in the correct answer as to what we're seeing. Its not fool proof, but it requires so much 
=>more work on the part of the spammer to get it right that it severely cuts down on automated 
=>subscription spam.
=>
=>Thanks to Sean for the link to this nice example:
=>
=>http://www.fordeabbey.co.uk/pages/contact_us.php
=>
=>Luckily, a great captcha module is already implemented and ready to go on CPAN:
=>
=>http://search.cpan.org/~unrtst/Authen-Captcha-1.023/Captcha.pm
=>
=>I took a look at mj_wwwusr, but where to put the hooks was not clear. There is a lot of parsing and 
=>passing around objects, so I wasn't quite sure where the subscription form check and add is 
=>happening - or if I should be putting anything in mj_wwwusr at all really by the time I finished 
=>reading the code. The html form part is pretty trivial in the subscription template. I just need a push 
=>in the right direction on where to put the hook for the subscription form (and thus the captcha) 
=>check.

I hope this isn't too far afield of the mj2 discussion, but I'd like to 
throw a couple of comments in:

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart 
is not all that wonderful a system. Not all people can pass the test. It 
can be hard to do. I'm not a total spaz, but I've had numerous times when 
CAPTCHA resulted in large numbers of retries.

There's also another system I do like called textchas which is a pute text 
alternative. It's in use on the moin wiki system. Pardon the python 
snippet, but here's the config setup I have here for my wiki.

    textchas = {
        'en': {
        u'What day comes after Thursday?': ur"Friday",
        u'What do you turn to start your car?': ur"Key",
        u'Who is on the $100 bill?': ur"Franklin",
        u'Who says "WOOF!"?': ur'Dog',
        u'What flows in your veins?': ur'Blood',
        u'What is the capital of Massachusetts?': ur'Boston',
        u'What do you wear on your feet?': ur'Shoes',
        u'What do you wear on your head?': ur'Hat',
        u'Who was the first president?': ur'Washington',
        u'What are trees made of?': ur'Wood',
        u'How many days are there in December?': ur'31',
        u'How many bases are there in baseball?': ur'4',
        },
        }

It's sysadmin configurable and supports multiple languages.


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