Captcha blocking all bots for 3 months.

When I first set up this forum, it used to be abused so often, from bots happily walking through the CAPTCHA.

Now, 3 months after changing my captcha to my own method, one I like to call random backscatter, I have bounced 100% of the bots out of the registration process. Spam accounts are non existant, even when I check for them.

This is almost fun to see the scripts that are so arrogant as to assume thier OCR actually worked (yes, to an OCR system there's a bibles worth of text in there! Laughing

), keep trying to post after failing registration miserably. Do not these scripts actually check their own registration status?

Anyway, seems my generator is bot proof. And allthough hard to read by humans, it is a one-time challenge, thus it must be 100% repulsive to automated processes.

Now the question to you other phpBB admins... should I publish the script? Or is my captcha too hard for your users?

Zap!

Meh, busy week. Kinda asked for it.

Attempts in the last week +2 days 20.

Spambots with a visual cortex... 0

Captcha violations by spambots... 0

Almost fun. Just waiting for the first spambot/malbot/assbot to make it through... then I am going to disect what went wrong.

(I should rename this mostly dead forum to "THE CUCKOO'S EGG")

ROTFLOL! Very Happy

Zap!

Now over 50 attacks a day, and...

0 violations of CAPTCHA and...

Very nice comments on http://phpbbmodders.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2630 ...

EDIT: phpbbmodders.net all but abandoned 2.x phpbb documents, and phpbb.com soon will. But for now it's on the phpbb.com 2.0.x mod dev forum.

I have decided to fast-track release and you can get your own copy at http://zaphodb777.dyndns.org/backscatter.php .

Many thanks to the folks at http://phpbbmodders.net/ !

EDIT: Thanks while it lasted I should have said.

Enjoy,
Zap!

Last edited by zaphod on Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:52 am; edited 1 time in total

Looks like all bot attacks have, and will fail. My new C.A.P.T.C.H.A. system seems 100% "human only" navigable.

As a strange note, I named it backscatter, perhaps errantly, not knowing a special kind of spam was named this too. It's true reason for being named Backscatter, was due to a cetain type of radar dectection system, that requires heavy processing of incipient background R.F. energy to use. In this case the hidden letters of my CAPTCHA are the stealthed aircraft in the background noise of the universe, as would be seen by a "visual" representation of backscatter radar reception.

It surely has nothing to do with causing spam, quite the contrary, it has everything to do with stopping spam!

Till later,
Zap!

The attacks keep coming...

Yet this script still keeps bouncin' them.

BTW, I generated this account, without intervention of my admin account, just to check everything was working...

it is!

Enjoy!
Zap