Peter Zaballos doing “Meet the Expert” session for #TeamSPS!
Tech support walkup session for #TeamSPS. Great way to solve problems and build connections in the team! Making it easy for our team! Love the experiments that Dan Megears and his team are doing to help us operate smoothly! In house Genius Bar!
Welcome to “The Cloud”! The #TeamSPS space rocks. 😊
Very excited by the announcement of Let’s Encrypt! We’ve needed this for a long time!
Upgraded 2 Macs, 2 iPhones and 3 iPads tonight. #freshbits
So happy to see The Decemberists are coming to Minneapolis! 🎶
“The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens Disrupts my reverie again” — The Decemberists
Model train clearing snow. Surprisingly awesome.
Question2Answer Number Captcha
I’ve been using Question2Answer for a number of years now to power Ask Planet Kubb. I like Question2Answer because it is simple to run, uses a standard PHP + MySQL setup and can even be used in a multi-site farm configuration easy enough. However, I’ve been frustrated by it’s ability to manage spam registrations.
Question2Answer has built in support for ReCaptcha and it has a plugin method to use other anti-spam measures. I’ve used ReCaptcha for a while, but it results in 4 to 10 spam registrations a day. I tried switching to the Q2A Logical Captcha by amiyasahu which uses Text Captcha. I even submitted a pull request to properly salt the captchas. But this resulted in 3-4 times the spam registrations as ReCaptcha! Ouch!
I decided to apply the same type of spam defense I’ve successfully used for MediaWiki and early results are great. It uses the Numbers_Words PHP package to spell out a number of nine digits and then ask the user to identify the number in a specific position. The question looks like this:
This works really well. You can grab q2a-number-captcha and git clone it for your own use.
Awesome to hear SPS Commerce won Tekne Awards this evening! Missing event due to AWS re:Invent. Shout out to #TeamSPS!