I'm pretty sure everyone here knows what CAPTCHA is. Most of you, including me, just don't know what it means. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." Still stumped? This picture is an example of a CAPTCHA-



I was thinking this would be useful in keeping bots from signing up. Don't get me wrong. I love fake love letters as much as everyone else (I really do appreciate it), but it can't hurt to find an easy way to reduce their ability to share their endless affection.


Davideo7 :

Would this be something that could be implemented at some point or is it more difficult than I think it is?

You've been recieving love letters? =p
I never knew any bots were on here.
If he implemented that id hope it wouldnt be required every time you post because thatd drive me up the wall.

thenumberone :

The funny part is they think there's a chance that I share their feelings

I wasn't saying to do it for every post. In my opinion, that would get really annoying.

The love letters are spam PMs from bot users saying stuff like, "I love you... blah blah blah... email me at ____." It's a generated spam PM. I was suggesting adding CAPTCHA as a requirement when a user tries to sign up just to keep spam bots from getting on.

I'd say it's a good idea. It can't can't hurt can it? As well as help keep them away. Definitely not for every post you make though, that's seems a little excessive, I would hate it if it came to that.

I hate those things, half the time I can't even read them

Bots are not that big of an issue though, we got a lot of security on this site such as newbie quiz, newbie level, etc... If anything pm's should be restricted more for newbies that is where most the bots are spamming love connections. Plus, we have how many mods? Like 20? Most sites that have these captcha try to use it to make up for their lack of mod skills which we are good at here on vizzed

It should only be included for posts that have links in it (normal and newbies), and for registration. That's what I think would be fair.

I actually want this to happen. It would be nice so we don't have any newbies/normals "accidentally" posting porn

I know you only meant for signup, i just wanted to ensure that david wouldnt decide to implement it everywhere =)
Im almost jealous, wheres my bot stalker =p

Actually I'm pretty sure the people signing up are real people but once they sign up, they just automate their spam.

3 reasons why I believe this:

1. No one is going to make a program just for spamming vizzed. Other forums get a lot of spam bots because their common forums engines but vizzed is really 1 of a kind.

2. The registration process on vizzed would be hard for a spam bot to get through anyway. It requires email verification and after you've verified your email, you have to set your birthdate and than type in your age and it has to match your birthdate. Most bots aren't going to get passed that unless they were specifically designed to do so.

3. If bots were able to get pass the registration process, we would have a ton of spammers on the site. JigSaw and I had a message board for GYR and we got spammed all the time. Vizzed rarely gets spammed so that tells me that currently no bots are able to go through the registration process (and if they could, like I said, there'd be a lot of them).

If it ever did become a problem, I might consider it but what I would rather do is make the newbie quiz required in order to sign up (currently it's required in order to post). There's no way a bot would get passed the newbie quiz.

To stop the PM abuse, maybe I could make it detect the message of the last PM someone sent. So in other words, if someone sends the same message twice to 2 different users back to back, it'll stop that PM from being sent and set their PM limit to the day to 10 automatically (currently newbies can only send 10 PMs a day).

Galacta : Actually newbies can't post pictures and when they post links, they're not clickable.

JigSaw : I'm assuming you'd agree with everything I said?

Davideo7 : There are bots out there that do cookie stuff and can actually post without being registered but that doesn't seem to be a problem here since the site has good security on it.

Sure people can bot the newbie quiz and registrations but I don't see the point in it. People who spend time on making a bot would much more likely be making one for a major site like facebook where they can reach millions of people instead of thousands. However the bots here only seem to have reached like 20 people max in pm spams before a mod catches them lol. Still though its pretty rare on here unless they spam people who never login but whats the point in that?

People probably can already bypass captcha's since its extremely common on the internet and those people who make bots know how to get past pretty much anything they want. Captchas will soon be replaced with finger prints or eye scans one day I can just see it coming

JigSaw : But if the bot was going to do cookie stuffing, it would have to know the hash password of someone's account.

Davideo7 : Maybe an easier way to deal with PM spam would be to just tell new users that they can't send PMs in their first 24 hours. I'll bet if you checked the times you'd see that most of the spammy PMs come within hours of a "bot" or whatever signing up. And really, who has reason to PM someone on their first day on a new forum?

Or maybe just make users fill out captchas for PMs? I don't know, just fishing for ideas.

Lazlo Falconi : Actually a lot of legit PMs are sent within a new user's first day. A person might have troubles playing a game or have troubles with the RGR Plugin so they'll PM the RGR Staff. A user might want to thank me or may ask me for a file. A user might lose the password to their account, make a new account to PM me about it. Someone may refer a friend and that friend may PM them and ask them to help them around. There's a lot of situations where a user would need to be able to PM on their first day.

Like I said, there's already a PM restriction, users can only send 10 per a day. The better idea I think would be to make them take the Newbie Quiz before they can send PMs.

If I may, I'll add an extra thought onto this.

Including a CAPTCHA on Vizzed is giving ownership of it to Google. You're basically just leaving all of the security to Google, which is like building a house and then selling all of the walls of the house to someone else. I think that it'd be best to keep Vizzed independent from monopolies such as that; after all, we've already got Google Ads on here along with the search engine tagcloud, adding the CAPTCHA would take it one step further. If Vizzed must have a CAPTCHA, it should be built locally.

That, plus the fact that CAPTCHAs are so immensely popular that there's bound to be someone who's going to crack it... it's something that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

If I may.

Captcha's are ANNOYING AS ALL HELL.

If I see a site with a captcha I generally dont bother signing up since most of the time I can't read it.

It's more trouble than it's worth.

I think we should start renaming the forums to stuff like /a/ and /p/ in advance.

Wow. I knew there were bots here and there. But I didn't realize you got love letters from bots. Sounds like you're quite popular with technology these days xd.

the_casualty : You do know that having a CAPTCHA doesn't mean you have a reCAPTCHA, right? Also you should probably re-read the terms of agreement for the reCAPTCHA service because you certainly are NOT giving away any rights to Google, or any other company. And it's not like having a CAPTCHA of any sort takes away from the other security measures that already exist.

Lazlo Falconi : Yes, I know that. You're implying that I know nothing about what I'm talking about. Ahahahaha.

reCAPTCHA would be the likely choice. Even if David didn't choose reCAPTCHA, the captcha of choice would either be hosted on another server, or owned 100% and constantly being updated by said company, so that it could be kept up to date and therefore actually do what it's supposed to do: add security.

Downloading a CAPTCHA outright and not updating it would be silly, because once the CAPTCHA software in question is cracked, "oops where did my security go?". You're screwed over once you start using CAPTCHAs because you're leaving the security to another company. It's just as smart as choosing that one kid with questionable intelligence who you've never really met to work on a science project with, and then leaving half of the project to him. If the person in question goes away, you're out of luck.

So, soooooory. Adding a CAPTCHA would give Vizzed away to [insert business here].

All it would do is add a few little silly words that people have to type in just to do something as simple as sign up or send a PM. Does 4chan ring a bell?