Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
This incident raises the question if it's time to consider a CAPTCHA
feature in Ringlink. Personally I'm hesitating; recently I saw this
remark: "captcha ... those are those anoying picture text boxs that I
can never read." I couldn't agree more.
Someone previous raised the concern about a wish for "Ring status
control for the system administrator" as a way to deal with Spam rings
(manual version of captcha?). Myself as I see it, a Spam ring isn't seen
by anyone until it has the required number of member sites, so is not an
immediate concern for the system...
Maybe instead of captcha there was a Ringlink feature where the system
admin could set in rlconfig the number of days a ring could remain in
the system without a predetermined number of member sites before being
automatically deleted? The system would then have the following warning
on the ring create page under the submit button "PS: Your webring will
be removed if it has NO member websites within '7' days of being created!"
The thing about Spam rings (I classify as 0 member websites) is how
quickly they clutter up your system! :-( You get the ring notification,
it looks iffy as a ring, but you give it the benefit of the doubt, and
then forget about it... Take CrickRock as an example "We removed over
1,800 empty rings from the system as part of our cleanup". Myself I just
removed 47 rings from the WOW system, and it was a rather tedious
experience (verify number of member sites, when created, and...) I do
not know how webring.com and ringsurf.com deal with Spam rings if at all??
I agree captcha sucks, and would only scare off allot of ringmasters if
used within a ring system, as it does say with forums and blogs and
everything else?
Ringmaker has captcha for members (turned on and off by the ringadmin),
and with the WOW Ringmaker ring when turned on it stopped all the Spam
sites dead, but then since turned on I have got zero new sites seeking
to join... Would the same be true of rings seeking to join a system?
There are allot of opinions on captcha for example:
http://www.trenholm.co.uk/?p=113
Pete