CAPTCHA

[DanielLC]

The CAPTCHA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) on this forum doesn't look very effective. It not only has clearly separated letters, the letters have clearly separated pixels. I suggest using reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/), which, in addition to not being broken, helps digitize books.

On an unrelated note, if you log in or out in a separate window in the middle of a post, it confuses the forum software.

[Arepo]

As far as I know - Ryan might correct me on this - both issues are integral to phpBB, in which case there's not much we can do about them. Until the forum grows quite a lot, banning/deleting bots who slip through hopefully shouldn't be too time-consuming.

[RyanCarey]

thanks for the feedback DanielC

With the captcha, I do feel there's good reason to keep the difficulty low. The last thing a budding community needs is for a Turing test to frustrate new users attempts to join. I do recognise that it's there for a reason though. So here's how I've set it:
for registration: enabled
for guest posting: enabled
using GDcaptcha (colour, angles, lines): Yes
using foreground noise: No.
extent of background noise: fairly low so that the captchas can still be read by humans.

I'm very reluctant to include foreground noise because it's not adjustable and it makes the captcha really difficult for a human. On switching to recaptcha, it might be possible to just slip the code in, I'm not really sure. I don't feel a huge amount of urgency about making a switch considering that we haven't encountered any bot problems so far.

As for the fact that logging in or out while posting confuses the software, It sounds like we might be able to submit it to
http://www.phpbb.com/bugs/phpbb3/
Can you provide any more information on the issue?