All,
I'm working on tightening things up to stop the torrential influx of spam. The process needs to be refined a bit.
Thanks for your patience as we continue to address this.
Dave
We're going to go ahead and add a login system over the next day or two.
Would I need to read a bunch of legal terms, and fill out a bunch of forms, to register an account?
I can understand that, if registering an account is too easy, then it is useless. However, if it is too difficult, it stops questioners.
It often helps if you are forced to supply a valid email address and can't activate your account without clicking a magic link you get sent out to the email address you supplied.
This also helps later when trying to blacklist people - you block the account and block that email address from creating a new account.
People who run own mail servers can create an infinite number of email addresses but in that case it's possible to blacklist the whole email domain.
No legalese, other than the checkbox that says you realize you're going to get an email for account validation.
We built this for OnARM.com (now defunct) a few years ago and it worked pretty well. I'm migrating that login system (not the entire forum) and integrating it with this application.
The process is basically:
1. Create an account 2. Supply a valid email address. 3. Site emails you 4. You click a link in the email, validating your address. 5. Link takes you to a page to reset your password. Which does NOT require 1Of 3vEry!@tipe of character in UTF-8 alphabet. Because that is lame.
So, pretty typical stuff.
PS:
I feel everyone's pain - I'm already getting frustrated entering CAPTCHAs just replying to these threads. The CAPTCHA is a stop-gap measure that is fairly effective and took a minimum amount of time to implement, not a long-term solution.
... could you also fix the delay in marking posts read
Test.
FWIW: no improve on that front after today's downtime.
The thread list view still claims that old threads (as in: no changes since before the downtime) are new, by showing them boldfaced. And before I posted this, the thread list still claimed that the latest contribution to this thread was made "Friday, 06:47 GMT", although the actual latest contrubition is David Lively's "Test" post, whose timestamp in the thread list is Thursday, 23:47 GMT. The latter is credible, the former way is wrong, by the same 7 hours I've gotten used to here (Germany, GMT +1). Looks like it's still applying a timezone correction bass-ackwards.
The lengthy maintenance window was due to issues unrelated to the forum. We are validating forum modifications at the moment which should address many of the concerns that have been raised.
We recognize the value of the forum to our users and take it very seriously. As such, any changes have to be carefully considered and tested before deployment.
Today I have failed several times with the captcha - maybe the "quality" has been increased.
It's just that the automatic captcha processors are better than most human beings, so trying to get a captcha to stop spam will block normal users more efficiently than the spammers.
That recently happened to me with another site.
I ended up cleaning my glasses.
Problem was then resolved.
Cleaning glasses doesn't help much when some characters are totally squashed so there is just an indication that there is one or more extra character hidden in there.
The majority of images have been easy but I have had three today that have been way past what I can guess. All images with digits are trivial to see. Some of the text images have zero distortion. But a few of the text-based have been very garbled.
Have agree with Per here, had several of the letter based captcha's choke, the number based ones less so.
Not sure if it's case sensitive, or just lacks the ability to deal with multiple interpretations of what the text should read.
The captcha doesnt work well. The captcha wanted me to type "always" instead of which i type "alwasy" while typing very fast. and clicked the post button immediately without verifying. i thought that this would result to error, and a new recaptcha may be generated. but SURPRISE! SURPRISE!!.
the same happened while posting this thread too. i typed 'seh' instead of 'she'. still worked. added the above line later. :P
PS: I may be exposing the loop-hole, but since i have no other option left but use the forum, i m writing it here.
To Dhaval Solanki,
The below links provide Keil.com Webmaster's email.
http://www.keil.com/forum/23116/ http://www.keil.com/forum/17046/
Search '@'
I think it works as intended, i.e. I think that the server has a "good enough" setting where they allow one or two characters to be incorrect while still accepting the answer.
There would be too large number of fails from valid users if it required 100% correct answers.
This is waaaay outside my expertise, but my banks website switches to a new window after the user id is entered. Thus the user ID and the password can not be entered simultneously. Again I have no idea if this would improve the spam resistance, but if it does, great
Dear David, http://www.keil.com/forum/57375/
Too many spams may turn away the genuine posters.