TerraFrost wrote: Say the MOD was accepted immediatly and that two months down the line, someone has a problem with it. Are you going to tell them "Sorry - I'm not interested in trying to pick up the project again", too?
I see your point, but I'm also quite frustrated. I wrote my photo-recognition captcha to solve a major deficiency in the core phpbb2 codebase. Bots are a problem that plagues everyone, and this modification solves the problem once and for all. I carefully designed it so that it could be integrated into the core distribution without disrupting anything, and so that it would be extremely difficult for an AI to break. Frankly, it's a no-brainer for inclusion in the core code. Now I learn that phpbb2 development is closed, and that the phpbb3 developers are explicitly rejecting alternate kinds of turing tests --- they want all their captchas to be based on optical character recognition.
So now my only choice is to distribute it as a mod. It's far less useful as a mod than as part of the distribution. After all, there are already plenty of anti-spam mods. The only reason mine is better is that most of those mods, if included with the distribution, would instantly be hacked. Mine would not, it's a real turing test that exceeds the capabilities of modern AI. If mine is distributed as a mod, it loses its primary selling point - that it can be distributed universally and still be strong.
But still, I can hope that maybe someday somebody of importance will see this and think "hey, that was a no-brainer... I wonder why we didn't integrate it months ago." So I submitted it to the mod database, figuring that they're more likely to notice something in the database.
So now you're telling me that if I want to do that, I have to become the permanent maintainer of a separate piece of software - just for the hope that maybe someday some developer will see it and use it as it was intended.
PS. My captcha demonstrated here, just click "register":
http://www2.panda3d.org/phpbb2