Like i said, im not an expert on it in any way, but it may be possible to set up some type of rules based system. There has to be a way to set it up for newer users, or not have it get applied to users with x amount of posts or something.
I'm very sorry they aren't being more helpful with you. Perhaps you could speak with the designers of the plugin module?
I won't add any more comments to this thread because I really have no experience in the matter and I'm not sure I'm helping :)
You're right, this part is possible. I have thought about doing that, but I don't really want to invest time if we can quickly implement a superior solution.
Thanks a lot for your comments, I do appreciate them.
Thanks very much! With this method would it be possible to return the user back to the post editor with a "Please try again in 30 seconds" error message and preserve the form contents?
Have you tried question and answer based CAPTCHAs? The blurry text can be hacked with OCR and the Math is pretty easy for computers. Q and A can be pretty effective because even if humans set up an account they generally might not understand English.
Thanks for the link! I am considering using Bad Behavior, which doesn't analyze post content but rather post method and post origin. But it's only a secondary line of defense. The most important will still be our community moderated anti-spam system.
With the trigger in place the database would return the insert error to the forum.
I could not control the message displayed by the forum. You could even get an "internal error", depending on how Drupal handles DB errors (and I'm not an expert in Drupal)
I'm looking at one of the new CAPTCHA's - "Do you hate spam?" What if a user does like spam? What if a user (ie. newbie) thinks "spam" is referring to the food? Also, I guess uppercase/lowercase doesn't matter on the answers, right?
I can do it with PHP but unfortuantely I know next to nothing about Drupal.
The problem is getting the right event to trigger the function that will, for example, return true if the user has posted in the last time interval. Then you could try to display an error yourself - but I cannot help you there.
Back to my original solution, I don't see a big problem with displaying "internal error" messages, especially if all human users are aware of the motive. If someone hits F5 and the time interval is set to 30 seconds it will probably refresh with the comment correctly posted. And it will probably cause a robot to give up it's attack.
Anyway, the trigger could be set as a last line of defense - say it only block posts 10 seconds apart. The good news is that triggers are usually pretty fast. Bad news is there will be an extra select on a large table for every comment posted.
Feel free to contact me if the new captcha fails...
I mentioned this in another thread: would it be possible to set the need of "solving" the CAPTCHA to every 10th (or a random number) post instead of one at the beginning of each session? By doing so the robots might be halted in their spamming.
If it's easy to do it could be a quick fix until your plan works out.
I like the easy question CAPTCHA, though not for every post. The Captcha Riddler module lets you come up with a few different questions to ask and have them rotate. Other easy questions:
Write the word blank in the box below.
In BLF's motto at the top of the page, what meets with flashlight? (variations for meets and flashlight)
one of the things you can do as well is to moderate the new user for an "X" number of posts, allowing them to prove themselves... so captcha's checking their posts before posting... spammers will even find ways around those ... FnF has a unique way... they have to send an email to the owner... then he makes the call whether it is a bot or a human.