Spammers unable to post at all

  • Resolved Anindya

    (@-anindya-)


    2 years, 4 months ago

    I noticed that after switching to Friendly Captcha, spammers have been unable to post at all. When I gave hcaptcha try, they had no problems posting. It even seemed to me like they assumed I did so for “monetary gain”. ?? One of them even posted a comment linking to an automatic captcha solver which supported hcaptcha also.

    Anyway, it has been three months since I switched to Friendly Captcha and only two successful spam comments have been posted. I noticed that one of them was posted using a residential IP address (ACT Fibernet). So I was wondering if the IP addresses that the spammers are using are being blocked from “fetching challenges” or whatever. They appear to be using datacenter IP addresses. Most likely VPNs.

    They now appear to be complaining about “anti robot verification failure” using trackback spam. Here’s a screenshot – https://postimg.cc/7fjzRFTD . I have tried posting comments myself, and it seems to work fine for me. ???♂?

    I don’t want to switch back to hcaptcha because it is useless for preventing spam, plus I have myself had difficulty using it in the past. Even after solving the captchas successfully, page would sometimes just reload and show captcha widget again. Has happened many times with websites that use cloudflare. Was happening with vultr.com just recently. Tried visiting their site and cloudflare was preventing me from doing so and showing the hcaptcha widget. But even after repeatedly solving the captcha, it kept denying me entry. ?????♂?

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  • Plugin Author Friendly Captcha

    (@friendlycaptcha)

    Hey there!

    Thanks a lot for your feedback!

    Glad to hear that Friendly Captcha is working for you ??

    Best wishes,
    The Friendly Captcha for WordPress Team

    Thread Starter Anindya

    (@-anindya-)

    You are welcome. ??

    I forgot to mention that I customized the error message a bit to show “anti robot verification failure” in title. That’s where they were getting it from. I was thinking about telling the spammers to update their spamming toolkits or something using a message somewhere in case the friendly captcha widget is not “visible” to them. ??

    But I thought it could be due to “fetching challenge” error, because even I encountered it once when my internet connection was “misbehaving”. ?? After all, they are able to bypass recaptcha and hcaptcha, surely they could have made the occasional post with friendly captcha active also I was thinking. ???♂?

    I made some other changes to the captcha plugin for my use after checking the code of some other captcha plugins. Here is a “patch” – https://pastebin.com/zV6MZFAt .

    I also forgot to mention that the captcha was being checked only after akismet, so that should definitely be fixed. ???♂?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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