Captcha?

If you browse the board for ideas what should be standard in punBB, and if Rickard had done all this then punBB would be bigger than phpBB today. Bigger, not better...

I think captcha is a good thing but since it's so easy to mod why not leave it to people to just do it?

plus, it depends on GD2 which is not implemented on all servers.

Can't it be done with images created from Photoshop?

Lucky for me I have GD. (I'm a poet and dun know it)

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 … p;from=rss

In Nucleus CMS, we began getting hit with comment spam late last year. A blacklist plugin was quickly made by one of our developers based on the MT spammer's list. All was well until we started getting targeted spam, our small project was on their radar screen.

To make a long story short, Nucleus 3.2 was released on March 7, 2005 with Captcha support. I've never had any more issues with comment spam since then. I can now concentrate on other tasks instead of cleaning up daily f*cking p*ker spam.

There is.
But I think once you start with "exceptions" you will find a board sooner or later that has all kinds of conditions so it's more or less a matter of good luck getting a complete install depending on your system.

I think punBB should try to run on all systems matching minimum conditions in the same way.
And offer a captcha mod (that already exists) to those who can and want to implement it.
This mod is terribly easy to implement by the way.
Everybody seems to install all those mods that are a lot more difficult to handle because they look funky or add some kind of candy to the board - what do I know - so don't come and tell me it's too much asked installing a captcha mod

Yes, the accessibility angle is problematic. There would have to be an alternative method of registering for those who couldn't use it. Of course it could just be a case of providing a checkbox which, if selected, uses email verification as a fallback. I will see if I can find out anything on some of the accessibility sites.

EDIT
I just came across a different kind of CAPTCHA called gatekeeper which Eric Meyer developed for WordPress to prevent comment span. This one doesn't use graphics so should be accessible.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpres … eeper.html

I think I read somewhere about a method which checks a hidden field on a form against a randomly generated time limited number which can only be use once. Though that only works if the bots are faking a form submission rather than dealing with the form itself.