Maybe I should go back to working on this new style I am going to release hoping tomorrow and see how this all turns out with the Recaptcha debate. :)

There really is no such debate. It is a tired old, defeated toy.

You would get more accomplished releasing a style on here, that trying to figure out how to add the " new " recaptch to your site. :)

And by the way I have been beta testing a mod that stops the human spammers too - it is SO effective I allow unregistered users to post, and have had ZERO spam get through in the year I have been running it..

Spam CAN be stopped, you simply have to win the internal, nattering nabob of negativism and defeatism battle in your own head first, to pull it off. And eschew all the games, puzzles, gadgets and other such nonsense.

I don't use any of those spam stoppers you guys are talking about and I have been using recaptcha now since 2008 ... in the last year and some months I have had (0) ZERO... that's right zero spam accounts on my site ...

How have I accomplished that? IP blocks from countries that are know for spamming ... I don't need anyone from these countries on my site to begin with ... yes I might be blocking some players and gamers from accessing my site, but the numbers are minimal and not worth my site and forums getting hit by spammers and the sacrifice is worth it ....

I used to have Kunena forums before and I had a forum spam stopper running on that ... the amount of spam accounts being created was just insane! ... I look at my error logs maybe 3-4 times a week on my cPanel and I take note of the new IPs that hit my site's register.php file ... now I did use BOP5S Rename register.php by BOP5 mod and since then not only has my site gotten faster in loading, but I have also seen less spiders and bots hitting my site's resources and I haven't seen a single attempt on my new register.php file after I changed it's name ...

I posted in another thread that scripts that are made to battle spammers might actually invite more spammers to your site because of keywords used in the script that spammers and hackers look for in such scripts to battle and protect against them ... so far my theory on my site has proven that I am onto something ...

I used spam o matic when it first came out and the day after I installed that on my site the number of hits by spammers and bad bots more than tripled ... I was just setting up my new vb forums so I uninstalled it and while I made the changes to my new theme, added a few mods here and there and some custom work on my site in general , it took me maybe 3 weeks to a month .. after than I never used anything to fight against spam except for the recaptcha and I have been fine ...

What works for me might not work for everyone ... but I also do spend a couple of hours each day monitoring my site and forums and that is probably the biggest reason why I don't get spammers hitting my site like other people do ...

I also use reCAPTCHA on my forum (700k+ posts), Cloudflare, and not a single anti-spam plugin. I encouter maybe 1 bot registration each 1-3 months.

Well how did you two add the recaptcha to your sites? I would be interested in checking it out.

I'm using the old reCAPTCHA, the one which comes with vBulletin.

Ahh, yeah this was about their newest release.

I'm also curious if anyone has added the new ReCaptcha successfully. Many of us would like to know how. ^^

This doesn't look like it should be very difficult. I'll try to throw something together if no one else is working on it. It might be a little more difficult to integrate it with the existing human verify system, but it shouldn't be difficult to just add it to registration.

Yeah Kevin that would be cool, as I don't have time to work on it. :)

Ok, yeah, you didn't sound too excited about it. Well, maybe until that last post.

Thanks a bunch mate. As always I appreciate the stuff you do around here for us not-so-knowledgeable people. ^^

The anti-spam goodies we recommend are all home grown here at vBorg, and are for the average folks out there who might not be as technically sagacious as yourself.:D

Right, and banning countries or IP blocks might not work for everyone. A site such as this, can not use that. :)

Hey guys, just wanting to pop in and add to the discussion. I'm from FunCaptcha, a team dedicated to providing an alternative to the traditional text based CAPTCHAs.

Our lead designer actually goes into minute detail on the very topic you guys have been discussing here. It's a good read and should bring to light a few concerns people currently have with the ReCAPTCHA changes.

Any and all feedback is welcome!

OK, I've posted a version here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=315960 but it's for vb4. I was part way through working on this in vb4 before I realized that the original request was for vb3. But vb3 looks to be the same except for the template, so I'll just need to work on that and I should be able to have a version later today.

Meanwhile if anyone wants to try out the vb4 version, let me know how it goes.

The vb3 version is ready (I hope): https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=315964

I had a really long written response for this thread, but I'd really just like to comment on a few things.

Keep working towards beating spam, its the only way we'll ever stay ahead of them.
However, for however many man hours we can devote to beat them, they can devote 100x more than we can.
Solutions always work for a while, and they'll continue to work until such a time they get too popular, esp if they're stagnant (not evolving, not pushing forward).

Less trouble than trying to answer my earlier questions I guess. I'll re-post them:

Tell me how they're going to defeat all the checks.

1.) The timers: Botnets rely on speed and high volume. Programming even a short delay means potentially a million fewer stabs a week. Delay can't really be programmed, because you have to make it long enough to defeat minimum time, short enough to pass the check for maximum time. No way to know the settings site to site.

2.) False fields - botnets are programmed to put SOMETHING here. And they do. And always will.

3.) Dots, dashes and other punctuation in email usernames - this mod has settings too. How many dots are allowed? Commas? Semicolons, underscores? There is no way to know these settings.

4.) The targeted lists - these are not honeypots. These are lists of guaranteed known bad user agent strings and hostnames. Not IP addresses.

So please. How are these genius spam purveyors going to defeat all of these checks? Specifically.You just defined recaptcha. The "new" part of it is, a checkbox. Big whoopie. The native vB checkbox was defeated long ago as are all the ones used by yahoo, hotmail, and others. This is about five years behind.

The key to stopping spam is many booby traps. Not just one "magic bullet" that doesn't exist anyway.

I think you guys actually agree that multiple methods is the right idea, that way all sites aren't using exactly the same setup.

It's actually not just a checkbox. In fact I believe the checkbox isn't something to help defeat bots, but something to make it less annoying for users. The claim is that it will somehow recognize real people so that most of the time they will only have to check the box. But in any case it will be interesting to see if the new recaptcha actually works. If a user doesn't have js then it still falls back to just showing an image, so I don't know how that's different than the old one, because obviously bots aren't going to run the js part to help it work better. (There may be differences that I don't understand - I'm not an expert on how it all works).

We'll know if it works when we start seeing less spammer email addresses from gmail, right? Since presumably, google itself is now using this "new" captcha.

It's the exact same thing as the old recaptcha ..only difference is that you have the box to check first where it says "Im not a robot" and it has the check box ...then you still have to verify the two word phrase just like the old one ....you can also do an audio one ....


https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/12/29.jpg

The audio bit has been there before. There is stuff going on behind the scenes when you check the checkbox. It appears to rely on a lot more javascript which is a lot harder for bots to deal with.

I never said the audio was not there before...I guess I should of said that it has an audio default widget to use instead of the image one ...

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/12/28.jpg

And I never said anything negative about recaptcha, on the contrary I swear by recaptcha as it has never let me down in the past ... I know exactly how "people" not "bots" have "cracked" recaptcha and I will continue to support and approve the use of recaptcha and recommend it's use to all my customers when I build them websites and they need some type of human verification ...heck ..its the only one I use lol ..

About to install this on my forum. Nice work with it, kh99. :)