A TextCha is a pure text CAPTCHA—and thus a case of a “logic puzzle”. Configuration: see HelpOnSpam

CAPTCHAs

A CAPTCHA is usually an image with some (more or less) hard to recognize content. A human should be able to recognize the content, a bot should not be. (CAPTCHA = Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.)

CAPTCHAs have some problems:

(!) These were the main reasons we did not implement them yet.

TextChas

For moin 1.6 we implemented textchas because of those increasingly annoying spammers.

Features:

Tips:

Discussion

Some remarks:

BTW, we have spam bots creating accounts currently, thus getting into the "Known" ACL category. Some captcha maybe could stop this, too.

This all sounds very reasonable and since TextCha is only an optional feature (turned off by default), there shouldn't be any problems..

Questions:

A word on wording: A CAPTCHA is not necessarily that pixel graphic thing, but is, by definition, a “turing test”. Also the so called TextCha uses the CAPTCHA method (= automatically tell computers and humans apart), but with an other technique as other CAPTCHA implementations (“logic puzzle” instead of a visual and/or aural verification).—It however still is a CAPTCHA. So I don't think there is a need to introduce a new term such as “TextCha” for something that already has a name. -- MartinBayer 2007-11-11 17:15:18


How about some "nocaptcha" ACL right. The wiki admin could assign it to some specific user(s) or group (GoodUser, GoodUsersGroup, Known, ...). It could be even assigned via a page ACL, if you don't want to ask for a textcha on some specific page. If a user has nocaptcha right, he does not have to answer captchas. -- ThomasWaldmann 2007-11-10 23:42:58

I don't think using ACLs is far fetched. "write" tells "may write to the page/attachment", while "write,nocaptcha" would tell "may write to the page/attachment even without answering a captcha". We can also use "notextcha" to be more compliant with regard to consistent use of terms. Also, on does not usually need to give "nocaptcha" with on-page ACLs, it is rather something to be solved in acl_rights_before. -- ThomasWaldmann 2007-11-11 12:31:24

ACL is too low level and adding acl rights for any action is not a good idea. We need a simple and general solution to make the life of the main contributors easier. This means no textcha, no antispam or any other "protection" - because we trust these people. We use similar system on master and it works great. I would also not add another config option - just add a special hardcoded group name for trusted users. If users demand, it could be configurable in the future. The code to implement this is very simple - just check if the user is a member of that group - about 2 lines? -- NirSoffer 2007-11-12 19:40:21

i would really appreciate if there would be a trusted user group where you can get promoted to. this would make 90% of the edits textcha free i guess. -- ThurnerRupert 2007-11-17 04:43:26

As I didn't want to touch ACL stuff short before 1.6.0 release, I just added textchas_disabled_group = u'WhateverYouWantGroup' wiki config option. If you are a member of that group, you won't get textchas. -- ThomasWaldmann 2007-12-05 12:17:31


I just had a user lose data because they didn't know what the TextCHA was about, left it unanswered, and then were kicked out of the editor, with their changes gone. (hiding behind the browser's back button)

I'd like to suggest three changes:

-- 72.221.120.106 2010-04-13 23:19:13


(!) The following modification is discouraged. Spammers create accounts these days - and with a little human help they can spam forever after answering a single textcha. -- ThomasWaldmann 2009-03-17 20:35:11

In order to enable TexctCha only for unregistered users, I made a following hack in MoinMoin/security/textcha.py and it worked for my moin. FYI. -- HidekiShima 2024-03-19 08:55:39

if disabled_group and user.name and request.dicts.has_member(disabled_group, user.name):

(replace above with following)

if user.name:


MoinMoin: TextCha (last edited 2014-08-06 13:27:25 by PaulBoddie)