913933 - Replacement of current CAPTCHA

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Websites :: wiki.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW]]

It is clear that the present barrier on wiki.m.o is not working effectively (maybe not at all). Amongst the changes I'm about to push to prevent spam I'm thinking that we should change the current captcha, possibly to use http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asirra/

Although it is image-based - so possibly having bandwidth implications - this gives a major advantage that it is not language/script-dependent in any way, as with current text mechanisms. Their selection corpus of images also means it shouldn't be programmable for bots.

The matching MediaWiki extension is http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit , which would provide the implementation.

If there are no comments in the negative I'll include this in the 'big buglist change' at the end of the coming week.

Comment 1

[Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW]]

I've been doing further research on the nature of our 'spam' registrations, and it has become clear that they are mostly _not_ bot-generated, but human-interaction (albeit using a scripting tool). As such, changing the captcha we use is now a low priority and I'm therefore closing this bug, at least for the moment.