Marspedia talk:Captcha

Greetings,

Are these captchas already installed on Lunarpedia? If so, why are we still suffering from spambots? What can we do to improve the effectiveness of the captchas? Are there install instructions somewhere?

Thanks Charles F. Radley 19:50, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Charles, as far as I know the regular set of captcha triggers are active on both Marspedia and Lunarpedia, but these triggers only address the following events:

• 'edit'
• 'create'
• 'addurl'
• 'createaccount'
• 'badlogin'

The new trigger 'gibberish' needs to be installed. I am not familiar with the wikimedia software installation process, but I think the green parts just need to be inserted in the files ConfirmEdit.php, ConfirmEdit.i18n.php and ConfirmEdit_body.php respectively. Someone with file write access permission on CGI level must do that, I suppose. --Rfc 09:05, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Rfc.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I wasn't aware that the 'gibberish' trigger was available, it wasn't when I originally installed ConfirmEdit. I see the latest version has an additional file. I hope to look into installing the new version this weekend, but please bear with me, I need to upgrade all 5 wikis before I proceed to upgrading ConfirmEdit. Also, depending on the requirements, I can't promise to get the new version of ConfirmEdit to work. As it is, we're going to lose our US-EN spell checker.

- Mdelaney 06:03, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi again Rfc,

This has now been implemented. Let me know whether it's working properly.

For future reference, when posting code to any mediawiki site, it's best to enclose the code inside <nowiki></nowiki> tags so the wiki doesn't misinterpret the code. This caused me a little trouble when I added your modifications as some characters were missing from the code I pasted to the file. The last green section isn't displaying properly in the wiki, the line

if( $section == '' ) { // do the check only for whole page edits

is showing up as

if( $section == ) { // do the check only for whole page edits

It took me a little while to spot that problem ;-)

-- Mdelaney 21:45, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Oops, sorry. I tried the nowiki-tag before, but I was not able to mark the new parts green this way. Thanks for installation. Unfortunately, the gibberish trigger is superimposed by the edit trigger, making it impossible to test. -- Rfc 10:36, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you have to nest the nowiki tags inside the color tags.

You make a valid point about testing the gibberish trigger, I'll set the first two triggers to false after I get some sleep. Disregard my plan to do this later in the week as mentioned on Lunarpedia. I think we can test it on the Scientifiction wiki first since we'll be restoring that to it's Sept 25 state.

I've done two all-nighters in a row, I need to get some sleep.

-- Mdelaney 13:33, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay. Sweet dreams! -- Rfc 14:13, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Rfc, I've changed to triggers as you suggested. Please let me know how well the gibberish trigger is working.

-- Mdelaney 02:51, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Mike, the captcha still pops up for any edit with the message "To edit this page, please enter the words that appear below in the box". I have tried on both Marspedia and Exoplatz. My impression is the 'edit' trigger is still active, because this is the message text from the array defined in file "ConfirmEdit.i18n.php" for 'captcha-edit'. The message for 'captcha-gibberish' would look different: "This is a test against a malicious ..." -- Rfc 13:44, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Rfc, the current settings are as follows.

$wgCaptchaTriggers['edit']          = false;  // Would check on every edit
$wgCaptchaTriggers['create']	     = false;  // Check on page creation.
$wgCaptchaTriggers['addurl']        = true;   // Check on edits that add URLs
$wgCaptchaTriggers['gibberish']     = true;   // Check gibberish
$wgCaptchaTriggers['createaccount'] = true;   // Special:Userlogin&type=signup
$wgCaptchaTriggers['badlogin']      = true;   // Special:Userlogin after failure

Are you sure you were logged in when you tried it? -- Mdelaney 04:00, 13 February 2008 (UTC)