Visual confirmation image

[coolio]

Further googling for captchas[3] finds interesting further readings. /me wanders off reading more about captchas on the web...

How come I'm the only one who doesn't know what /me means??

Can someone please explain??

[Bertg]

/me = I'm

or sothing like that...

It's a IRQ command
you type /me is leaving
you get *username*is leaving (BertG is leaving)

-bert-

[liquid_eagle]

IMO, the visual confimation is great, apart from o's and 0's. i had the same problem as libertate when registering...

but, i think the way it's generated is making an aray of A-Z and 0-9 then randomly putting them in an image, so if someone doesn't like it, they can simply remove the 0 and o from the array. (i think)

anyway, great job so far devs! keep up the good work!

[chAos]

I might be wrong, but i though the array stores the raw code for each character. So you could make a 0 a O or an A a Z or something like that.

Although i haven't looked at the code in a long while.

[psoTFX]

0 (zero) is represented with a diagonal line through it ... the explain text in the 2.0.5 contrib Mod notes this. At some point I'll add it to 2.2's lang.

[Adam Atlas]

coolio wrote:
How come I'm the only one who doesn't know what /me means??
Can someone please explain??

^
|
Italicized because quote bbCode seems to be b0rken


"/me" is an IRC command used to talk about yourself in the third place. If you were logged onto an IRC server as "coolio," and you typed:
/me doesn't know what /me means
it would be displayed to everyone as:
* coolio doesn't know what /me means

But it's come into common use on Usenet, email, and, as was just demonstrated, web forums. I know there's a MOD for phpBB 2.0.x that does automatic replacement like this.

[libertate]

psoTFX wrote:

0 (zero) is represented with a diagonal line through it ... the explain text in the 2.0.5 contrib Mod notes this. At some point I'll add it to 2.2's lang.

Tha problem still stands. If the presented code only has letter O's, then the reader would not know if that number 0 are represented with slash, unless that is clearly explained in the registration area. Also on some older terminals it is reversed, i.e. letter O is slashed, not the number zero. People who used these machines for decades are hard to train.

Suggestion - script font?

(I am on a usability kick right now, can you tell?)

[R. U. Serious]

It is easy in PHP to use TrueType fonts for drawing characters into images. I don't know if phpBB already does this (haven't looked at the code, yet), but I am sure if it does not do it already it'll be easy to implement.

I am sure there will be mods for this pretty fast. If you don't see one, remind me in the RC-phases, I'll do one. I think there probably would be a problem with copyrights, if phpbb would distribute a font-file along, so that's my guess why it won't happen in core-code/default-distribution.

However if you feel that the problem cannot be solved (for you) with a different font, than the only other way would be to use a dictionary for real words, instead of displaying random carachters. However that would noticably reduce the security, given that the dictionary file woul.d be distributed along, and thereby into the hands of a given 'vandal' (enabling dictionary attacks).

[psoTFX]

There are some misconceptions and misunderstandings here ... so let me explain:

1) As I've said, in 2.0.5 the contrib Mod clearly notes that zero has a diagonal line through it ... the logical conclusion therefore is that o does not (a logical conclusion quite easily reached I think ). I'll of course transfer this text over to 2.2. Similarly, as with 2.0.x the contact email address is noted should any users be unable to read the image (for whatever reason).

2) We do not use GD ... when I started working on the visual confirmation stuff I wanted a) something that was "hard" to overcome (simply displaying a few seperate images is quite easy to work around), b) would work on "most" PHP installs and c) wouldn't bog down the server.

I ended up generating a png on the fly rather than using GD, Imagemagick or NetPBM. This I did because it "appeared" that zlib was more commonly installed than any of these apps/modules. That isn't actually too surprising given zlib is required for gz based buffer compression. Indeed in Windows it's built by default and that's true AFAIK for all platforms with PHP 4.3.0+ ... unlike GD.

It also "appeared" quicker (for the same size image) than GD where several images needed to be composited and/or pre/post manipulated