CAPTCHA This!

Got a forum? Worried about spam attacks? Read on-- this may help...

Because Penny and Aggie has a discussion forum about teenagers, albeit fictional teenagers, we found especially vile spam on our PHPBB pages almost every day. It got so bad that I was considering restricting access to current members and people who e-mailed me personally. And that's no way to grow a community. So what could we do?

The default security on discussion forums is a "captcha." The most popular kind of captcha is shown at right. As you can imagine, the string of characters is computer-generated. But PHPBB is free software. Anyone has access to its program. Anyone can take it apart and see how it works. "Anyone" includes everyone who programs spambots for fun and profit. And no "randomizing" software is truly random-- take two copies and run them under the same conditions and they'll always come up with the same results.

Ah, but spambots can't anticipate human behavior! What if you modified the captcha so that forum owners could personalize the test, and create a version that applies only to one forum, ruining the "economy of scale" that makes forum spam profitable?

Torstein Hønsi asked this "what if," then made it happen. Thanks to him, Gisele and I can sleep soundly at night, knowing we will not have to delete "OMG RAPE STORIES" first thing in the morning.

I hereby declare this National Torstein Hønsi Day.