Anti-Bots: object photo based CAPTCHA

[whismerhill]

hello,
recently I saw these weird people talking things that don't make any sense.

so I thought I would give you guys a tip on what I used on my previous forum to prevent having to deal with bots.

I used a php plugin based on object recognition in an image

for example you get some small sized pictures of cars & some of cats
then when someone registers he sees a selection of those pictures & need to check the correct boxes (for example the instructions would be : check pictures of cats only)
it worked very fine on my old forum, I was rid of 100% of any bot registration
(even though the day they work out the thing, they may be able to get through but they have a very small chance of passing through, depending on the number of images shown to the user)

advantages:
-it's not as widely used as the standard CAPTCHA with text written which means an extra layer of protection
-some photo-text based CAPTCHA are hard to read depending on the quality of your human eyes, this mod does not pose that problem

inconvenient:
-people are not used to it, so you may occasionally have to deal with the guy who email you because he's a dumb ass who don't want to read instructions (which are neither long nor hard ...)



For security purpose I won't give any links in public, so if the person in charge wants it...
this mod exist for both phpbb2 & phpbb3 (have not tried phpbb3 version though)

PS: I know that the forum still needs to be upgraded, but I posted this now that I think about it ;)

edit: ho and one last tip even though it's obvious, some people forget it and then we are doomed, always make a database + FTP backup before any modification

[skipclarke]

We do have some anti-spam code built into the current phpbb2 install. i am actively working to style phpbb3 to look like the current forum. we will be working to beef up the captcha there. i've used one mod on another phpbb3 site i put together and it's worked like a champ.

[whismerhill]

ok wish you a nice day
and anxious to see all the features of phpbb3 coming to WSGF ;)