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Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 8:04 am
by joepal
Right now a lot of people are reporting having to answer a captcha due to "too many login attempts".

This happens now and then, and I haven't figured out exactly why. However, my current reasoning is that this is not due to a brute force against your account specifically. It is rather due to a peak in spam bot login attempts in general. Since there is a caching proxy in front of the forums, the forum software thinks all these login attempts come from the same IP adress (the address of the proxy) and thus starts showing a captcha for everyone who comes from that IP address (which is literally everyone since everyone goes through the proxy).

It's inconvenient, but I'm not keen on disabling the anti-spam measures we have.

Usually when this happens, it subsides on its own after a week or so.

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 2:40 pm
by loki1950
Remember the last time and glad that the captchas just a backward word that my browser caches so it's not that much of a bother ;) Think you have the reason down and the anti spam measures definitely should remain in effect.

Enjoy the Choice :)

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 3:00 pm
by wolgade
Thanks for the info. I had this issue a while back and now I'm having it again. Anyway, yes it sucks, but it would suck much more to have this forum filled up with crap.

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 3:03 pm
by brkurt
wolgade wrote:Thanks for the info. I had this issue a while back and now I'm having it again. Anyway, yes it sucks, but it would suck much more to have this forum filled up with crap.


How about a question like: "What is the ground speed of an African swallow carrying a coconut?" :D

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2016 8:05 am
by RobBaer
Joepal seems to have fixed this now. Feedback to the contrary?

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2016 4:15 pm
by loki1950
RobBaer wrote:Joepal seems to have fixed this now. Feedback to the contrary?


As he has stated before it appears to clear up randomly with some background action most likely a buffer or cache being flushed.

Enjoy the Choice :)

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2016 7:51 am
by RobBaer
loki1950 wrote:
RobBaer wrote:Joepal seems to have fixed this now. Feedback to the contrary?


As he has stated before it appears to clear up randomly with some background action most likely a buffer or cache being flushed.

Enjoy the Choice :)


Ahhh ... but this time we are talking about Joepal forcefully taking matters into his own hands, and the feedback request was to confirm any issues/failures since it solved things for Aranuvir and myself, Joepal never sees the issue, and the success of his fix to the rest of the community are what's at issue! ;)

[The post here came because I felt guilty for closing the issue on the bugtracker without even polling the rest of the community for status :oops: It can be re-opened if there are still issues]

http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.or ... 074#note-3

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2016 8:27 am
by Aranuvir
Leave it closed! It still works correctly to me. (Though, I'm not sure, if individual case reports meet the criteria of a proof. :D )

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2016 9:33 am
by joepal
Aranuvir wrote:Leave it closed! It still works correctly to me. (Though, I'm not sure, if individual case reports meet the criteria of a proof. :D )


I guess that's what Karl Popper was talking about :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

(yeah, sorry, I'm nerdy... I'm back at the university for a while again)

Re: Concerning captchas

PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2016 8:12 am
by RobBaer
So, seems university types are all alike, because I cover ol' Karl Popper in Research Design class :D The claim is that is you can falsify by providing a single counter example, but you can never prove anything true.