[Wilshire]

No one wants to get to our site that bad

reCAPTCHA is an awesome program, it decodes books... though I guess it will be obsolete in that function as well if this article can do what it says.

[Wilshire]

btw, direct quote from the article:

Google says that it's already found ways to further protect reCAPTCHA from being broken by others' computers. "Thanks to this research, we know that relying on distorted text alone isn’t enough," Vinay Shet, reCAPTCHA's product manager writes in a blog post. Shet explains that part of this is analyzing a user's full interaction with the CAPTCHA puzzle — and not solely whether they can get the answer right.

[Cüréthañ]

Yeah, but that is Google's Captcha system.  Most web apps just use a generic captcha generator for .net or whatever.
Note that Google also own the pattern recognition algorithm

However, the Heartbleed issue illustrates that hackers (and by extension, the people who write spam bots) will often work out an algorithm very soon after they know it is possible.
Perhaps this is all just a part of Google's plan to make everyone rely on their plug-ins and thus rule the interwebs.

But yeah, the idea behind linking that now is that we might want to use google captcha if that isn't the default - whilst Sovin is messing with such things.

[Wilshire]

Thats way to vague to be threatening. You can be as paranoid if you want ("you" generally, not you specifically), but that fact that you use the internet at all means that you're at high risk. Sure, to be "safe" a website could spend 100's, if not 1000's or even 10's of 1000's of dollars on a monthly basis, but a forum with a handful of users just isn't worth that kind of trouble.

Sure heartbleed shows that someone, or a group of someones, can hack any system  no matter how secure... But reCAPTCHA, and CAPTCHA, have been around for years. They still exist and serve a purpose because they protect low priority sites (typically). Small, uninteresting sites are at less risk because there is low reward for "hacking" the site.

Kind of off topic... Lets stay on topic by suggesting things better than recaptcha : )

[Cüréthañ]

You're not really getting my point, it's not a security problem per sé - just technology that the next generation of spam-bots will implement, more than likely.
But nevermind, tangent dropped. :-D

[Aural]

I've banned 16 today, so its not that bad. Keep registration open unless it gets out of hand : P. A few sranc never hurt anybody, right?

Looks like it's almost getting out of hand...

[Wilshire]

7 more this morning. Its alright for now, I just won't be able to actively able to ban then today, so we might end up with several posts by the time I'm back later today.

The spam doesn't bother me, and I'd prefer not to lose a real member by disabling registration. Not worth that loss imo.

Mods, get ready for a real chopper.

Stick with us through the slog ; )

[mrganondorf]

Hope you are getting too many headaches from taking care of TSA!  I am raising a glass to the benefactors!!!  Actually it's peanut butter ice cream and a vodka shot, but I still really appreciate the Creators!!!  Hooray!

[Alia]

So, there seems to be something wrong with "Show new unread posts" function. I use it regularly, it used to work fine, but today when I clicked on it, I got nothing. But when I clicked on "Show all unread posts", it turned out there _were_ some new messages. Not that I'm complaining, just to let you know about this issue.

[Wilshire]

Thanks MG

Error reports are good, thanks Alia. We'll keep working to make it better.

[Alia]

At the moment, "new unread" function seems to be working just fine.

[Madness]

Thanks, Alia. Keep up any notation.

Also, now that the Google reCaptcha is in place, please report any spam posts. We've cultivated a habit of not deleting any accounts until they actually post a spam (a spam? spam? spam post?) (usually this is fairly obvious in that there is no relevance to the content of the forum and contains a link). I don't know how many Spam Skin-Spies might have infiltrated us during our moment of weakness...

[Wilshire]

We have a lot of new members that are still here, so there might be some spam yet to come.

[Aural]

The 'Mark all messages as read' keeps returning an error message for some time, but works eventually.

[Madness]

Thanks. Keep bringing up notation. So far, I need to query Sovin on Chorae rank icon, PM/Registration lag, and this "all messages" issue.