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Blank empty fields

John_S2000John_S2000
edited December 1969 in Technical Topics
I've recently noticed blank cells in the Last post column in the general Community main index page. It's currently seen in 'Introductions' and 'Non-Orthodox Inquiries'. It is safer to do frequent backups, just in case something goes wrong.

GBU

Comments

  • peterfarringtonpeterfarrington
    Its where spam posts and spammer accounts have been deleted. I am having to remove hundreds of accounts each day.
  • John_S2000John_S2000
    Dear Father Peter you must be overwhelmed with such time consuming duties. It would be practical to have an assistant admin in order to gain a bit more of your valuable time.

    There is a useful and widely used routine called Captcha that helps eliminate rogue accounts, and does prevent spam posts especially those sent by annoying non human bots. The disadvantage of the Captcha functionality is for persons with some types of disabilities.

    http://www.captchacreator.com/
    http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha
    http://drupal.org/project/captcha

    GBU
  • peterfarringtonpeterfarrington
    Thanks for your concern John. I don't develop the tasbeha site however, and I believe that spammers have managed to get around the captcha code. A huge number of spammers are from China on tasbeha at present.
  • geomike
    Actually Father, I am a programmer and so far there is no way to get past captcha. Each letter or number in captcha is not text, it is an individual picture. This is extremely hard to get past, and even if somebody wasted countless hours making this kind of unheard of program it would still decrease by a lot the amount of spam accounts.
  • peterfarringtonpeterfarrington
    I am a programmer too.

    Captcha was cracked a long time ago...

    In February 2008 it was reported that spammers had achieved a success rate of 30% to 35%, using a bot, in responding to CAPTCHAs for Microsoft's Live Mail service and a success rate of 20% against Google's Gmail CAPTCHA. A Newcastle University research team has defeated the segmentation part of Microsoft's CAPTCHA with a 90% success rate, and claim that this could lead to a complete crack with a greater than 60% rate.

    Everything gets cracked. That is why we are bombarded by Chinese spammers. Probably part of the Chinese governments activity.
  • minatasgeelminatasgeel
    i also think that this will take many users who have no posts with computer bots. authentication for the forum is also used with the media section to download.
  • geomike
    [quote author=Father Peter link=topic=11072.msg133744#msg133744 date=1300892100]
    I am a programmer too.

    Captcha was cracked a long time ago...

    In February 2008 it was reported that spammers had achieved a success rate of 30% to 35%, using a bot, in responding to CAPTCHAs for Microsoft's Live Mail service and a success rate of 20% against Google's Gmail CAPTCHA. A Newcastle University research team has defeated the segmentation part of Microsoft's CAPTCHA with a 90% success rate, and claim that this could lead to a complete crack with a greater than 60% rate.

    Everything gets cracked. That is why we are bombarded by Chinese spammers. Probably part of the Chinese governments activity.


    WHOAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You are an Abouna and a Programmer? I don't think there is a better combination. What language for programming do you use abouna? Btw, i feel stupid for saying my last post. I am still living in the 20th century, lol.
  • peterfarringtonpeterfarrington
    Mostly PHP and MySQL databases. I can do other web languages if I have to. Presently I am doing an Access database for a client so I am having to do some VBA.
  • John_S2000John_S2000
    Dear Father Peter,

    It is true no software or even hardware routine is continually 100% hack proof, and there is always someone out there to start studying it to break it - be it for security testing, improvement or for challenge. That's why many routines get to be regularly rewritten into hopefully better versions and Captcha is no exception.

    As geomike said it will at least stop a good percentage of the spams, probably not all of them but there are ways to improve that, by choosing the way it is implemented, the choice of graphic to be input, adding automatic analysis plus banning of IPs proven to send frequent spams via a scoring record, etc. There are many approaches to enhance the effectiveness of security. It is similar to building more fences around a targeted property.

    New member accounts have a manual membership confirmation link sent to their email to be clicked back to the forum with an added obligatory manual change of their 1st password using a second Captcha form. You can optionally add a routine check for cross postings of too lengthy big text blocks with badly formatted numerous hotlinks.

    Using another Captcha routine for new topics and replies (like when posting comments in many Blogs) may minimize much the likelihood of remaining successful spams. Another simple way is to use a question response challenge to accept new posts, that is unique for each member's private profile, like those used when we forget an email password in order to be able again to access our inbox...

    GBU
  • peterfarringtonpeterfarrington
    Dear John

    Thank you for your suggestions, they are appreciated, but I am not developing the site in any way at all, just trying to keep the forum in order.

    If Maged sees this he may have some comments.

    God bless

    Father Peter
  • John_S2000John_S2000
    Thank you Father Peter, you are most welcome.
    The forum is good and shows the efforts behind it, I hope Maged reads this.

    GBU
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