Captcha Problems

[tshore]

This is the first year that I've tried using captcha with OCS. My conference organizer reports that people are having problems with captcha when attempting to create accounts. One person gave up after 6 failed attempts. What I find helpful with captcha is the inclusion of a "Try Another" link. Have others experienced similar problems with captcha? And, any chance of a patch to give the user a chance to display another captcha if the one that's displayed is too difficult?

[tshore]

Anybody have any suggestions for me? Otherwise, I will have to turn off the CAPTCHA and I would prefer not to do that.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

We have a feature request for adding reCaptcha support, which would be much more flexible and useable: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4082. Not sure when we'll get to implementing it, though. Just the same, feel free to CC yourself to that report for future updates.

Cheers,
James

[tshore]

In the meantime, I went into:

classes/security/Validation.inc.php

and edited the generatePassword function (this function is also used to generate CAPTCHAs). I removed a number of characters that can be ambiguous when comparing upper and lower case (ie. vV, uU, etc):

Code: Select all

//   $letters = 'abcdefghijkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ';
     $letters = 'abdefghijkmnqrtyABDEFGHJKLMNQRTY';

Of course this probably makes the randomly generated passwords less secure, but, otherwise the CAPTCHA was practically unusable.