Forum Suggestion - Registration Security

[rossums 2190]

Hello there forum-goers,

Anyone that frequents the forum will know that the forum has quite a problem with spam posts - these are from new, randomly-generated users and used for spamming advertisements in threads.

This is the current sign-up page used to register for the DayZ Forums:

As you can see it has the fields for Username, E-Mail Address and Password (With confirmation) and a single CAPTCHA as a security check.

I'd like to suggest an upgrade to the current sign-up page to reduce the number of bot-created users and reduce the workload for the forum moderators so they can browse themselves and moderate more important threads instead of constantly hiding and removing adverts.

Since the forum already uses CAPTCHA to reduce fake sign-ups there are a few routes the administrators could go to tidy up the forum.

The CAPTCHA could be changed from the standard reCAPTCHA (like above) the most websites use, this tends to be the most popular CAPTCHA solution but this is a double-edged sword, the popularity means that it is also the most easily circumvented.

reCAPTCHA can be annoying to legitimate users too and often contains characters not included on a standard ISO keyset, making users unable to complete them.

An alternate solution, also from the CAPTCHA project is called ESP-PIX - a simple yet more fun solution that to this date has not been cracked.

This is a very simple CAPTCHA with a word in common to be picked from a drop-down box.

In the above example the word is 'drop' - select it from the menu to continue.

Another solution would be to add an additional security question in the form of a user-readable question which is not possible for a computer to correctly answer.

There are obviously multiple other security methods that can be implemented but I think that now would be a good time to properly update the forum in anticipation for the alpha launch of the DayZ standalone.

With the standalone attracting many new users, especially upon release, it will allow the moderators to more efficiently moderate the forum without having to worry about multiple reports for each advert/spam post.

[SmashT 10907]

Yep. a few suggestions have already been passed onto the web team, StopForumSpam and ProjectHoneypot are also quite effective. I'll add this ESP-PIX captcha to the thread in the web dev section if I can find an ipboard plugin for it.

Edited November 17, 2012 by smasht_AU

[Inception. 9443]

Interesting.

You should PM this to Griff, he is the one who works with forum suggestions.