Anti-Spam Options - Solve Media CAPTCHA - Protect & Monetize your Forum

Please remember to click Mark as Installed if you use this modification.

Description
Secure and monetize your vBulletin forum with Solve Media's free CAPTCHA replacement. Use Solve Media's free CAPTCHA solution and earn money from CAPTCHA. Solve Media has created a patent-pending technology that turns CAPTCHA into a branded TYPE-INs?. Every time a visitor to your site enters a CAPTCHA brand message, we share the revenue with you. Users are easily frustrated by traditional CAPTCHA. Solve Media CAPTCHA TYPE-IN? ads are easy to read, easy to complete and reinforce messages that are easy to remember. For visually impaired users, the Solve Media CAPTCHA widget offers an audio CAPTCHA puzzle.

Read about Solve Media in the Wall Street Journal.

Installation

1. Download and unzip the vB-solvemedia4_x.zip archive.
2. Upload solvemedialib.php and class_humanverify_solvemedia.php to your /includes/ directory.
3. Import product-solvemedia.xml via the Product Manager.
4. Register for a Solve Media account at http://portal.solvemedia.com/portal/public/signup and obtain a set of API keys
5. Change the Human Verification Library to Solve Media via AdminCP > Human Verification Manager.
6. Set your API keys and make any desired configuration changes via the Solve Media Options.

Version History

• 1.0.6 - Bugfix
• 1.0.5 - Bugfix
• 1.0.4 - Uses vBulletin's template system. Bugfixes.
• 1.0.3 - Added language option and support for HTTPS sites
• 1.0.2 - Initial Release

[Budget101]

Ok, you want an honest review of how this works, here goes: I have several different sites with several different versions of solvemedia running including the following:

vb 4.0.6
vb 4.2
Wordpress
Drupal

Both VB versions completely blocked members & guests from participating on the site by returning a code mismatch error in all browsers tested (firefox, internet explorer, chrome, opera)

I contacted them directly for support as we used the mod directly from their site and they're "working on it". In the meantime, I watched the revenue from "Solved" type ins Drop from $4.85 eCPM down to $2.71 eCPM so although I made MORE last week, this week the income that I "made" has dropped to little to nothing. I'm sure by the time I reach ru55ians level of several thousand, the eCPM will plummet as his clearly did.
As you can see from the post above ru55ian's eCPM dropped to $0.07 - frankly, the chances of ever getting paid are slim to none since you have to reach a $200 threshold and the high numbers of complaints for the difficulty on the form cannot be ignored in favor of (non-existent) revenue. I have a hard time accepting .07 eCPM for ads from companies like Toyota/ Swiffer/ etc

I don't think the frustration of members is worth the $1 a week "earnings".


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UPDATE
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I left this junk running on a couple of my sites and the eCPM has dropped to .01 - if you think this crap is a MoneyMaker, you'd better hope for BILLIONS of impressions, lol. SolveMedia is junk.

[Lutece]

Originally Posted by Budget101

I left this junk running on a couple of my sites and the eCPM has dropped to .01 - if you think this crap is a MoneyMaker, you'd better hope for BILLIONS of impressions, lol. SolveMedia is junk.

It is a money maker for THEM, lol. I wish I can find a real revenue stream that isn't a joke. I have this on my site and I'm doing the math. They are giving me 1 cent per solved type in that they "count" (not every type in is monetary, according to them). But charging advertisers 30 cents per solved type in....

With 2,000 type ins, that's $500 for them, but only $20 for me.

But even that's not the worst of it.
You have to earn $200 to even make get a payout.

Nice little scheme they have going there. This is ridiculous.

[fly]

They're running a business that you're free to work with or not. What's the big deal? You don't know their overhead, and more importantly, it doesn't matter.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Lutece

It is a money maker for THEM, lol. I wish I can find a real revenue stream that isn't a joke. I have this on my site and I'm doing the math. They are giving me 1 cent per solved type in that they "count" (not every type in is monetary, according to them). But charging advertisers 30 cents per solved type in....

With 2,000 type ins, that's $500 for them, but only $20 for me.

But even that's not the worst of it.
You have to earn $200 to even make get a payout.

Nice little scheme they have going there. This is ridiculous.

Yeah, quite the scheme where you have a working CAPTCHA and pay no money. Where they really get ya, is when they actually send YOU money...wait...

[Budget101]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Yeah, quite the scheme where you have a working CAPTCHA and pay no money. Where they really get ya, is when they actually send YOU money...wait...

LOL, Yeah, except there are 2 things wrong with that...

1. It doesn't actually WORK- it locks people out of the site regardless of what they enter in the field and when you contact them they tell you "it's working fine" despite multiple screenshots from multiple users, etc. Which I suspect is a scam in itself- get people to keep refreshing the ads in hope that they'll be able to get the captcha to actually function properly.

2. They don't actually send you any money, you must've missed the previous threads where the payout threshold is $200 and you get .001 CPM.

Stop drinking the Kool-aid folks, CAPTCHA isn't brain surgery and "Solve" media isn't "Solving" anything.

If you want to block spammers, insert a new field in the user profile & use regular expression to lock spammers out. Period.

Login to Admincp> User Profile Fields> Add a New Field >

Description: Enter any 3 five-letter words here ex: solve media blows
Call it Anti-Robot Field
Field Required- YES at Registration & Profile Updating
Field Editable- YES
Private Field- No
Searchable- NO
Show on memberlist- NP

Regular expression:

^\w{5}\s\w{5}\s\w{5}$

Display page: Edit Profile

Hit save and Voila- you now have a Perfect SPAM Prevention System that loads instantly without false promises & even better, now instead of spending all your time explaining to your site guests/members why they CANT access something because the captcha wont work no matter what they enter, you now have free time to search for Real Revenue Streams or add content so your current revenue streams will continue to increase.

[final kaoss]

Originally Posted by Budget101

If you want to block spammers, insert a new field in the user profile & use regular expression to lock spammers out. Period.

Login to Admincp> User Profile Fields> Add a New Field >

Description: Enter any 3 five-letter words here ex: solve media blows
Call it Anti-Robot Field
Field Required- YES at Registration & Profile Updating
Field Editable- YES
Private Field- No
Searchable- NO
Show on memberlist- NP

Regular expression:

^\w{5}\s\w{5}\s\w{5}$

Display page: Edit Profile

Hit save and Voila- you now have a Perfect SPAM Prevention System that loads instantly without false promises & even better, now instead of spending all your time explaining to your site guests/members why they CANT access something because the captcha wont work no matter what they enter, you now have free time to search for Real Revenue Streams or add content so your current revenue streams will continue to increase.

Not too good of an idea, people code software and will have no trouble adding this one to their list.

[Budget101]

Originally Posted by final kaoss

Not too good of an idea, people code software and will have no trouble adding this one to their list.

I disagree, I've been using it for several years on multiple sites with No Problems at all.

It's been my experience that most spammers are complete Morons who are too lazy to create/design anything for themselves, hence their need to spam.

[final kaoss]

Yeah you're not having trouble with it yet because it's not widely used. The more popular it becomes though, the more it'll be targeted.

[EvoDarrenshan]

I get the error could not open socket....

[chrisngrod]

This helps filter out SPAM users more than anything else I have used.

It took a long time, but I got enough to get paid last month.