Very interesting alternative for captcha

As a moderator on other forums I have learned to recognize posts trying to hijack a discussion to another forum, only to increase the posts in that forum. On a weekly basis I clean posts from auto bots scanning forums for certain words and if they find matches they subscribe and post a prepared publicity text. It seems that the modx forum doesn't have moderators and no posting rules.

In the 2+ years that I've been perusing this forum, I don't actually recall seeing any true spam postings. It's possible I missed them, of course.

With the big wigs at MODX hanging out here regularly, despite a not having very clear identification of "forum moderator" from the staff, anything out of ordinary would be squashed with a quickness. I assume actually that the staff are all moderators with permissions to deal with spam if it did show up.

There are moderators, and spam is flagged and quickly dealt with.

This particular instance can hardly be considered spam; the developer of the product under discussion joined in to welcome our interest and let us know where we can go for help with this particular product. I wish we got such notice and cooperation from other third-party products. A few helpful ones that come to mind are Brett, "the man can" from FoxyCart for ecommerce solutions and Aaron from One Smart Host for windows hosting issues.

Quote from: sitecms at Aug 24, 2012, 10:37 AM

sitecms Reply #9, 22 hours, 10 min ago

I think you are over reacting.

He's hardly hijacking the thread, the post was relevant.

Chill out.

Mike

I think you are over reacting. Chill out.

I made 8 clear points based on my experience in other forums but none is agreed upon in this forum. Ok, lesson learned for me. Now let's see what I can find in the fridge and chill out a bit with that latest movie "total recall" with Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale. It is said it must be real good.

@sitecms Wow, if anyone hijacked the thread it was your post. Thanks for your wealth of experience. But seriously, the posting was relevant to those of us that are trying to make use of the 3rd party service. Enjoy the show.

... my experience in other forums...

Ah, but this is not like other forums. Here we are helpful and friendly, and don't take ourselves too seriously. There aren't any Nazis here, grammar or otherwise - well, maybe I do get a bit excited over "its" and "it's" when used improperly


If somebody has a service or product that he feels might be of interest to anybody in the community, he's welcome to post about it, as long as it's in an appropriate forum. Even then, if it's not in an appropriate forum, the moderators will simply move it to the proper location.

When you feel a post is inappropriate or in the wrong place, just use the Report to Moderator link (the last link in the tools button in the upper right of each post).

http://free.sottwell.modxcloud.com/

No longer installed; I'm not pleased at its "phone-home" sneak monitoring. [ed. note: sottwell last edited this post 14 years ago.]

That's great. Is this integrated into modx?

Not yet; right now it's just a stand-alone demo using a snippet. I need to find out how something like the "recapcha" system is integrated and make this a drop-in replacement.

In order to use the code in a snippet, I had to modify the paths it uses to find its config file. Relative paths are relative to what? In this case, it was relative to the ayah.php class file itself, but when running as a snippet in MODx it has to be relative to the MODx index.php file (since everything is run as an include to that file).

I plan to enable moving the config file out of the web root, since it contains sensitive information and should be protected as much as possible. Probably what I'll do is just modify the config file to include another file that only contains the sensitive information. Then you can put that sensitive file wherever you want and just edit the path to it in the config file.