Discuss: Best Captcha Plugin Competition

[Fountain of Apples]

Just submitted mine to the MODDB: Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin

Ooh, I like it. Maintains the user-friendliness of the Q&A CAPTCHA, but throws in a draggable twist that will make it a bit harder for bots to pick up even if it is able to figure out the answer on Google.

[eviL<3]

ATTENTION PLEASE

The svn revision 9975 introduced a small API change that you should implement before you submit your plugin. The plugin class needs new method called has_config(), which returns true if it has a config page or false if it doesn't.

We will repack already submitted plugins to include this.

[eviL<3]

Important note

We have decided to extend the deadline of this competition from August 22nd to September 4th (so that is + 2 weeks). This is because there have been some late changes in the API and the Q&A plugin, and because we want to give the MOD authors some more time altogether.

[Derky]

How many plugin submissions did the MOD team get so far?












That could be a reason to extend it also.

[SyntaxError90]

How many plugin submissions did the MOD team get so far?
...
That could be a reason to extend it also.

...and because we want to give the MOD authors some more time altogether.

[Derky]

Ssssh I just want to know how many competitors there are.

I can find 3 plugins in the development forums now:
Search MOD Development Forum: Captcha, Plugin

[Fountain of Apples]

Competitors? That's not the point; in this contest everybody wins. (in that we get more CAPTCHA plugins.)

[DavidIQ]

Competitors? That's not the point; in this contest everybody wins. (in that we get more CAPTCHA plugins.)

Sounds like somebody was actually paying attention

[Derky]

Competitors? That's not the point; in this contest everybody wins. (in that we get more CAPTCHA plugins.)

Not everybody can win Berties!

[nickvergessen]

/me just sumbitted one

[GaryFrost]

/me just sumbitted one

where can i see it?

[ChriZathens]

where can i see it?

search.php?keywords=captcha&terms=all&author=nickvergessen&fid=70&sc=1&sf=firstpost&sr=topics&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

[darrells]

Hello,

Your competition raises a very concerning question. Why is nothing mentioned about accessibility in the competition guidelines? Does phpBB, despite previous promises, intend to ignore the needs of blind and visually impaired users?

As things stand now, phpBB employs a visual-only CAPTCHA that provides no audio playback, text or other means of providing access to blind or visually impaired people who wish to participate in phpBB communities. As a result, we are often completely locked out of an important communication opportunity. The inaccessible CAPTCHA represents nothing less than a "no blind people allowed" sign. We all learned, once and for all, in the 1960's that segregation in America is wrong and will not stand. Why is it that tools like CAPTCHA continue to lock out people simply because of their physical lack of eye sight?

I implore phpBB to update the competition guidelines requiring some means of accessibility in any CAPTCHA it will accept, and to make a public commitment to ensure the CAPTCHA found in the next version of the product will be reasonably accessible to blind and visually impaired users.

Regards,

Darrell Shandrow
http://www.blindaccessjournal.com

This is the discussion topic for the Best Captcha Plugin Competition announcement. Post any questions you may have in here.

[eviL<3]

Hi Darrell,

The newly introduced CAPTCHA plugin system which is the subject of this competition is very flexible. It surely does allow the development of accessible CAPTCHAs that work for visually impaired people.

While I understand the accessibility issues with CAPTCHAs, unfortunately there are technical difficulties when it comes to making them accessible. There are various approaches that allow this. phpBB itself will, in fact, include a "Question & Answer" CAPTCHA that is based on plain text. These kind of CAPTCHA's do however usually require quite some work, since the questions and answers need to be maintained. The administrators have the choice to use them, but ultimately it is up to them.

We want the administrators to be provided with a wide range of CAPTCHAs, so they can chose what suits them best.

To clarify, nobody likes CAPTCHAs. And nobody wants to lock blind or visually impaired people out of their boards. But with the amount of automated advertisements (SPAM) administrators have to deal with nowdays it is simply not feasible not to use them. There are many factors that must be considered when choosing the CAPTCHA to use.

The winning CAPTCHAs of this competition will not be included with phpBB, by the way.


If you have any concrete ideas or concepts on how to build a CAPTCHA system that prevents SPAM, works without maintenance and is solvable by visually impaired people, please do share them.

[mtotheikle]

The phpBB teams can not tell MOD authors what to place into their MODs beside that it must work with phpBB, MOD authors have the freedom to chose what they want to place in the MOD.

The current phpBB version, 3.0.5, does not support many different CAPTCHA's and due to this the current CAPTCHA system is not very expandable. However, for phpBB 3.0.6 the development team has decided to change the CAPTCHA system to a plugin based system allowing board admins to change the CAPTCHA used on the board easily. When this new plugin system is available, the reCAPTCHA system will be included in phpBB which does have an audio version. While this is not the phpBB default CAPTCHA, the system will have a CAPTCHA plugin with audio support. Even with this audio support though, admins can remove it or disable it, so phpBB is limited to what accessibility it can provide when ultimately the board admin should make sure that the site is accessible to everyone.

Written while Evil was creating his post...