Author Topic: Registration Suggestion  (Read 3405 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline solarblast

  • Member
  • *
  • Posts: 1
Registration Suggestion
« on: June 09, 2011, 03:25:47 PM »
I think registering for this forum is about the most difficult registration process I've yet seen. It's hard enough to read the Capcha two words, but the icon sliders were baffling.  I'd suggest moving the little "make the icons vertical" statement position from down and to the right up closer to the three icons.  They look completely detached from the main registration area.  It would also be good to put the "I agree" box on the top of the text, and not on the bottom.

Offline saratogaWX

  • Administrator
  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 9257
  • Saratoga, CA, USA Weather - free PHP scripts
    • Saratoga-Weather.org
Re: Registration Suggestion
« Reply #1 on: June 09, 2011, 04:00:28 PM »
Hi,
Sorry you had difficulties in registration.  The multi-level validation stuff (Captcha and icon-sliders) were needed to thwart the flood of bot and semi-human spammer registrations we had experienced over the last few years.  Apparently, the spammers have become quite adept as defeating Captcha through automated means, but with the addition of the rotating-icon device (A SMF add-on), the number of spammer registrations has thankfully dropped to zero on most days (saves a lot of work for the admins).

I generally don't fiddle with SMF plugins in order to maintain the ability to update when a newer version is released.

The "I Agree" is placed on the bottom of the page so that (at least) someone has to scroll down to have subliminally viewed the text before checking the "I Agree" checkbox and finishing the registration.

Thanks to these security features (and the httpBL + stopforumspam mods), our members can generally enjoy a spam-free environment here, so we do feel the extra effort in the registration process for humans just makes it a better place for all us weather enthusiasts here.

Best regards,
Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP

Offline Budgie

  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 130
Re: Registration Suggestion
« Reply #2 on: June 09, 2011, 07:33:37 PM »
Running a few forums myself, I can only agree with Ken.
Spam bots and spammers attempting to access a forum creates more work for the admin staff than anything else on a forum these days.
One of my forums has had 16 access attempts by known spammers in two hours this evening alone, these are the ones that the httpBL + stopforumspam mod didn't pick up, and this is not a large forum like WXforum. 

Offline saratogaWX

  • Administrator
  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 9257
  • Saratoga, CA, USA Weather - free PHP scripts
    • Saratoga-Weather.org
Re: Registration Suggestion
« Reply #3 on: June 10, 2011, 12:31:28 AM »
Yes, the 'noCaptcha' image rotation mod turned into a real Turing test so only humans seem to be able to manipulate the sliders to make it through registration .. only the most dedicated spammers hire humans to register for them (and we catch them fairly quickly from the India or Philippines IP addresses).
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP

Offline ws03

  • Member
  • *
  • Posts: 3
Re: Registration Suggestion
« Reply #4 on: May 14, 2019, 02:26:30 PM »
REGISTATION - new user...

I found the image rotation captcha to be a clever innovation i'd not seen before.
That said, it was one of the most difficult challenges i've ever encountered, more so than google's street image challenges (where there are cars, signs, etc. to select the existence of traffic lights/vehicles/signs in a few pixels in the corner of the tiny thumbnails)

I thought i was familiar/conversant with icons and thumbnail images in general, but i was unable to visually parse what one of this registration's CAPTCHA was, and thus at a loss to guess which orientation was wanted.

Adding to the difficulties was that several iterations of trying to "answer" the rotation challenges, several other fields in the web form were not re-populated, and thus posed errors themselves even when i got the captcha correct.
Of course the focus/frustration/feat was for conquering the captcha but not noticing that the  password & its retype  field   and   I ACCEPT checkbox were unpopulated (cleared)
--  thus the suggestion is to either alert us that these fields are not repopulated (and we have to re-enter them), or better yet, consistently re-populate them.

Offline saratogaWX

  • Administrator
  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 9257
  • Saratoga, CA, USA Weather - free PHP scripts
    • Saratoga-Weather.org
Re: Registration Suggestion
« Reply #5 on: May 14, 2019, 04:01:40 PM »
Sorry you had some issues getting the image rotation captcha to work for you.

The use of TWO separate captchas has been necessary for a while due to the increasing intelligence behind robo-registration attempts by forum spammers.  They'd love to get in.  I see (in the logs) hundreds (sometimes thousands) of attempts daily.  Each lovingly thwarted by our somewhat complex system. We don't auto-refresh fields just to make it more difficult for the robots to conquer -- the side effect on humans is regrettable, but necesary.

About 8 years ago, the miscreants developed a simple robot solver for the existing simple captcha system (and one for the image rotation system if default images were used).  We'd switched to custom images (weather stuff and robot pictures stuff) for the rotation system -- weather stuff has rain falling down, lightning striking down and the robot stuff has arms on horizontal bases.
Spambot registration automation can't currently solve both the Google reCaptcha AND the image rotation one, so our forum only has the occasional human spammer registrant slip in.  Mostly they are kept out since we use stopforumspam and manual registration validation to keep known human spammers out.  A few per year slip through and are quickly dispatched at first spam activity.

The good news it you only have to pass the gauntlet once at registration.  "You must be at least this human to enter".

Best regards,
Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP