All eight judges watched closely as the would-be bride Gretchen Trolloppe took the cake-cutting test.
Edwin Boll-Weevil, her betrothed looked on in bewilderment as the unsophisticated lass gleefully used a most unladylike stabbing motion.
It was at this moment that he realized he faced many more years as the unweddable Boll-Weevil bachelor.
Daze of Our Lives

PHPBB 3.0x Registration Spam Control Mechanism

May 14th, 2009 at 12:33 pm (Dust Bin)

Forum registration is the gateway to all manner of forum spam and staunching spam at the front door is the most effective policy. In the case of PHPBB forums, a particular method has been developed that is not unique in concept, but perhaps in execution.

The method in question basically imposes the requirement of additional information to be included with CAPTCHA code. Early versions required only a particular character to be prepended to the confirmation code value retrieved in the PHPBB3 forum file, ucp_register.php. However, the further enhancement described here involves random characters that are to some degree cloaked from detection by spam bots.

The cloaking method used is based on this article on cloaking emails. The character, itself, is generated by the following method

#random generator of non-alphanumeric ascii characters
while (is_numeric($randchar = chr(rand(33, 64)))) { continue; }

This random value is passed to a template variable in url encoded form. When the template is downloaded, a javascript decoder function found on Eric Meyer’s web site, converts the character back.
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