non-CAPTCHA and Honey-pots

[davewest]

Creative ways of defeating SPAM!

Its a never ending war to stop advertisers from wasting our time while maintaining the ability to communicate with our guests and users. You may never stop it without affecting user feedback.

I was adding to my blog about coding Honey-pots and some of the ideas behind it. Things I use on my own site. We keep talking about the idea of honey-pots and non-CAPTCHA style of tests, but only CAPTCHA was ever created as a mod!

Instead of discussing what one can code, I've created a simple mod for two honey-pots and a non-Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart or non-CAPTCHA. The auto-install of 9 Configurations in Layout Settings is to aid in non-coding changing of field names and settings for the slider.

Based on ZC1.5.5f

What's in it..
An update to the hidden input field should_be_empty.
A new hidden set of two radio fields that also tests as empty or false.
A non-hidden user adjusted answer slider, the non-CAPTCHA part of this mod.

I wanted to Keep It Stupid Simple with the least amount of added or affected pages. In use on my contact us page.

DOWNLOAD: zenNonCAPTCHA

[davewest]

I just sent in another update. Based on some more testing with the added variable '$userspam' it wasn't getting hit without adding more checks.

Changed to '$antiSpam .= ' the DOT EQUAL makes the same existing checks for both fields work without adding more code.

For best results, after install, change the three field names in Admin, Configuration, Layout Settings From Should_be_ to something else.

[Jeff_Mash]

Is there any reason why the form would submit even if the slider is incorrect? I installed it on our site, but it still submits the form even though the slider doesn't say HUMAN.

[davewest]

Is there any reason why the form would submit even if the slider is incorrect? I installed it on our site, but it still submits the form even though the slider doesn't say HUMAN.

If its not installed correctly or the header page has no antiSpam checks, then it would not work...

[lynbor]

A very nice and unfortunately needed addition to ZC!

I'm running ZC 1.5.5b and the installation was smooth as silk into my free responsive template that I'm using.

I did notice one thing that I think is minor but felt compelled to bring it up. After installing I was doing some testing and If the slider is set correctly by the human AND any or all the other traps are monkeyed with the submission appears to have been successful to the user. However, nothing is sent. So the system says thank you and your message has been sent when in reality, it was not sent because it failed due to something being in the fields that should have been untouched.

If the slider bar is not set to HUMAM then the system gives the "you're not human enough yet" error message and it's clear that your message did not get sent.

Not sure if this is by design or if I have something that I must tweak.

[davewest]

Not sure if this is by design or if I have something that I must tweak.

As designed honey-pots are set so bots get the success page if they fill in the field and move on, spam is not sent. The input field and radio fields should never be seen my humans. both fields have info that they should not be used... The slider is not using the word 'Human' as the test, bots see text input field or numbers, but I've not had one guess right yet, even my own bot! With 1 correct answer out of possible 50 is what the bots are up agents.

[lynbor]

As designed honey-pots are set so bots get the success page if they fill in the field and move on, spam is not sent. The input field and radio fields should never be seen my humans. both fields have info that they should not be used... The slider is not using the word 'Human' as the test, bots see text input field or numbers, but I've not had one guess right yet, even my own bot! With 1 correct answer out of possible 50 is what the bots are up agents.

Ah, so the answer is that the human isn't supposed to be seeing those fields but is so I need to try and figure out how to hide them so they only see the slider.

[lynbor]

Bingo!

Added

.email-pot {
visibility: hidden;
}

to the bottom of the CSS file and that hid what needed to be hidden from the HUMAN. Hope that is correct.

[davewest]

Bingo!
to the bottom of the CSS file and that hid what needed to be hidden from the HUMAN. Hope that is correct.

I've had that in my site main css for so long, I've missed adding it to the mod...

to hit all the devices out there try this..

.email-pot {position:absolute; visibility:hidden; display:none;}

Some folk position the field off screen to hide it, however, that makes the screen jump when you hit submit or other buttons. In testing I comment out the class so I can be the bot.. I'll have to send in an update...
Thanks for the catch..

[one tall man]

Dave,

Thank you so much for this captcha! I was apprehensive about using Google's recaptcha, but came across your mod and loved it.