forum.dlang.org is now using DCaptcha

Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Tue Dec 2 13:41:26 PST 2014


I'm sure you all are as tired of the occasional spam that hits 
these lists as I was deleting it. (Mailing list users in 
particular, I guess, since we can't delete an email once it was 
sent out.) Most of the spam was coming in through the forum, so I 
suppose I was responsible for [not] keeping it out.

Although forum.dlang.org has had a spam check and used reCAPTCHA 
since it was announced, it is only somewhat effective against 
fully-automated bots - it is powerless against humans paid to 
post spamverts on forums web-wide, which is what the current spam 
economy seems to be gravitating towards.

Enter DCaptcha, a question-answer challenge tailored for D 
programmers. Its goals are to challenge posters of 
suspicious-looking content with questions that should be easy to 
answer to D programmers, and impossible for non-technical people 
with no incentive to learn or research stuff (i.e. spammers). 
DCaptcha is already in use on the D wiki (wiki.dlang.org), with 
great success - DCaptcha's debut cut the short-lived explosion in 
wiki spam to zero.

For an idea of what sort of questions DCaptcha asks, you can demo 
it on the following page, so you don't have to clutter the forum 
with test posts:

http://wiki.dlang.org/extensions/DCaptcha/demo.php

Source code:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/dcaptcha

Pull requests for more challenges are welcome. You can find some 
goals for new challenges at the top of dcaptcha.d.

Previous discussion (w.r.t. the D wiki):

http://forum.dlang.org/post/tpflbvlfutjwyvqmowdx@forum.dlang.org


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