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We seem to be getting a lot of user registrations, did the update break some of the blockers?

Yeah, Rednaxela had some custom things in that got broken. He's working on it now.

Yeah, the update removed the Math extension which used to be part of the core of MediaWiki, but got moved into an extension. This broke some pages, and also broke the extra math question I added in added to the reCaptcha check. (Besides the extra math question, my modifications also included a "same IP address as received the captcha must solve it" check, which based on server logs was very effective)

Due to the error that was happening on the new user creation page, Voidious reverted back to the traditional reCaptcha extension temporarily, which let that flood of bots register.

Gladly, the custom extension I added which disallows accounts less than 24 hours old inserting external links was still intact after the upgrade, and appears to have foiled those spambots.

Also, I've now reinstalled the Math extension, both fixing some wiki pages and making my modified captcha checker work again, so all should be well now :)

Good to know. On that point though, I still think KittenAuth/Asirra would be a good auth system (and has nothing to do with me liking kittens, honest).

Asirra was mentioned in some emails that went around. I don't think Asirra is fundamentally any better than reCaptcha for the main problem. I suspect there's a high probability that rather than pure computer-based bots, the reCaptcha system was being broken by a Mechanical Turk style system that farmed the captcha breaking task out to humans. From what I understand that is common these days. Asirra is equally vulnerable to that technique. Assuming that is the case, the reason my modifications help, would be that rather than preventing the captcha-breaking itself, they make it incompatible with some automation systems used to farm out captcha breaking. I have nothing against using Asirra if people want to switch it to that instead of reCaptcha, but at least in theory I doubt Asirra vs reCaptcha makes much of a difference.

Well fair, I do know Asirra is much more difficult to break then reCaptcha for computers. It might also be easier for humans to do as well ( a few clicks instead of the need to type). It could replace the two captcha systems with one (math+reCaptcha with Asirra).

But I am not going to push the topic if no one else thinks it is a good idea. I do not know the compatibility or reliability of the system, and there is always the ever present "don't fix what isn't broken" mantra as well.

I'd prefer math+Asirra over just Asirra, because I'm pretty sure simply making the system on this wiki slightly unique, can break a significant subset of ageneric wiki-spamming setups. It's not like we're in the situation of wikipedia or other large sites where people would modify their spam tools specifically for this site.

I'm also pro-Asirra, but also content to leave our current setup if it's working.

I don't know if it's machines or people cracking the captchas. I know there exist people cracking captchas, but I'm not sure if we're a high profile enough target to make that worth while. I use Asirra on the BerryBots wiki and it's completely shut down any spammy registrations. (I think I was getting ~1 a day before that.)