Suspecting RC1 very soon!

[ndL]

5 days passed from the Announcement on phpbb.com website

cant wait...

[TimJBart]

I take the announcement to mean we'll have to wait a few weeks yet. If they were planning on releasing in a few days they wouldn't have bothered with the news update.

What's the current CAPTCHAs vibe? They looking good, or impossible to read?

Lets be honest, this is all a waste of time anyway. the CAPTCHA will be broken and we'll all have to install STOP SPAMBOT MODs to our phpbb3 board.

[Shadow Reaper]

I don't think it will broken that quickly, though I know it will be broken eventually.

I don't think that the developers knew when the CAPTCHA would of been completed, so Acyd Burn put the announcement out to ensure people wanting to know what was the hold up for 3 months what was going on, especially with the resignation of theFinn.
Also, as this is the last major hurdle other then bugs blocking phpbb3 RC1 release, it shouldn't be long til we see a nuke on those bugs again

[asinshesq]

I'm curious about the effort being put into the captcha in the face of the discussions in this topic asserting that the configurable question and answer approach is possibly a better (and certainly simpler) solution. And I know personally that the captchas I've seen in the past can be tricky for real humans to decipher (and of course impossible for people using text readers, as pointed out several times in this thread).

But the devs know way more than I do about these things, and I'm confident they have their reasons. Does anyone know the reasons why the captcha approach may be better than the configurable question and answer approach?

[TimJBart]

I'm curious about the effort being put into the captcha in the face of the discussions in this topic asserting that the configurable question and answer approach is possibly a better (and certainly simpler) solution. And I know personally that the captchas I've seen in the past can be tricky for real humans to decipher (and of course impossible for people using text readers, as pointed out several times in this thread).

But the devs know way more than I do about these things, and I'm confident they have their reasons. Does anyone know the reasons why the captcha approach may be better than the configurable question and answer approach?

SSSsshhh, let the put a capture in so they can give us RC1

I think they made a decision to use CAPTCHAs years ago, when they were deciding features, so it is too late to chop and change now. As you know, there is almost an infinite number of options if they decided to go to a required text field or question which would need a lot more debate and discussion between the developers than they have time for right now.

Perhaps a text field can be as well as a CAPTCHA in phpbb 3.2 ?


On a side note, I just looked at the phpbb 2 CAPTCHA. OH MY GOD!

[asinshesq]

SSSsshhh, let the put a capture in so they can give us RC1

Actually, my point was exactly the opposite. I gather they decided the captcha they went with wasn't very good so they are making some big changes in it. Getting that to work well enough may take a while. Getting a configurable question and answer approach to work well enough is (I think) under an hour of programming and there's not much that can go wrong with it. So I was figuring that scrapping the captcha and going the configurable question and answer route would speed up rather than delay RC1. Of course, that's all speculation on my part.

[Nicholas the Italian]

Getting a configurable question and answer approach to work well enough is (I think) under an hour of programming and there's not much that can go wrong with it.

I'd just like to remind that one hour human time equals to one week developers' time.

[asinshesq]

Getting a configurable question and answer approach to work well enough is (I think) under an hour of programming and there's not much that can go wrong with it.

I'd just like to remind that one hour human time equals to one week developers' time.

I already built that in...I was thinking it would take five minutes and I multiplied that by the usual developer expansion factor
(Actually, these guys are fast, but I gather they do a lot behind the scenes that we see only a small part of.)

[NeoThermic]

I'm curious about the effort being put into the captcha in the face of the discussions in this topic asserting that the configurable question and answer approach is possibly a better (and certainly simpler) solution.

Really? Thing is, question and answer approaches have these major problems:

• no way to release a default set of questions/answer
• language problems (If I try to register on a board that speaks Dutch for example, although I can read Dutch, I can't write it, and thus such a "solution" prevents me from registering)
• High workload for the admin. They have to come up with a set of questions and answers that are not easy to google for, and that are easy enough for a wide range of people to know
• Reply problems. Thing is, some questions can have more than one correct answer, or the answer might have more than one correct spelling (grey/gray, colour/color, centre/center, etc).
• Assuming there's questions which only one answer exists, then it would be somewhat trivial for someone to program a bot to obtain the answer via searches.

Those are just a few very good reasons why a Q&A captcha won't work. This is why a random letters captcha works, it avoids basically all of those problems.

NeoThermic

[asinshesq]

Thanks, neo. As I said in my original post:

But the devs know way more than I do about these things, and I'm confident they have their reasons.

Thanks for taking the time to spell the reasons out. I'm not sure that all of them are totally persuassive but certainly in combination they do give pause. And obviously you guys have put a lot of thought into this and come to the conclusion that captcha remains the better solution. I look forward to seeing what you come up with