Hola!  Another dev post in a relatively short time.  The reason being that we’ve been pretty busy behind the scenes.  We’re flying through our task list but there’s still a lot to do.  Also, it doesn’t help when new tasks sudden spring up and require urgent addressing (the website redesign was one of them, I couldn’t deal with looking at that bland old site any longer), such as what has just happened again…

With the setting up of Deadworld Studios as a private limited company and our business bank account (with associated PayPal and Google Checkout accounts), we’re getting to a point where we’re trying to increase our profile.  I started redesigning our website and little did I know that CWolf decided to submit our site to StumbleUpon, next thing I know I’m looking at a Google Analytics page that looks like this (image on right) and consequently a GMail account that looks like that (image on left).  Now, we’re not strangers to forum spam.  We have a few mods in place that keep these nefarious spammers at bay.  First off we’re using a Project Honey Pot to waste spammers’ and harvesters’ time and aid in the discovery of these.  Then we use a couple of SMF mods, one basically blocks all access for 100% guaranteed spammers, the other requires them to be approved if there is a suspicion that they are spammers.  Up until now this set up has been working for us but it does mean we get quite a lot of notices and have to go in and clear all the spammer accounts periodically.

Of course, with the influx of new traffic (regardless of whether there is a high bounce rate), we are attracting more spammers and with SMF’s poor CAPTCHA system something needed to be done.  Now, this is something I had been planning on doing for a long time, I even prototyped it a client-side only version, but never had time to fully implement it, but last night I blitzed it out (and I have a splitting headache now because of it).

Back in University (or just after) I came across a CAPTCHA system called KittenAuth (created by Oli Warner), either via StumbleUpon or The Register and thought “Hey, that’s a pretty genius idea.” but I couldn’t find any implementation of it, but that was fine, all I needed was the idea, so I bookmarked the page.  Basically, instead of using the traditional distorted sequence of character or words, it uses image recognition, specifically Kittens, in a 3×3 grid.  The idea is that only some of them are Kittens, the others are… well… other things.  So, armed with an idea (thanks Oli!) I give you KittunAuth, a mod for SMF 2.0 RC4 which adds KittenAuth anti-bot protection.  I’m also happy to say that since the installation of the KittunAuth mod for our forum, we’ve had no forum spammer registrations and even though it’s only been active overnight, this is still a plus as I usually wake up to a few sat in my inbox.

If anyone is interested in this forum mod for their own SMF forum, don’t hesitate to comment here to show your interest and I’ll see if I can make it compatible for other versions.  At the moment KittunAuth is still an incredibly early version and hasn’t really been tested, we’ll see how it performs over the coming weeks.