Captcha all the way !
I recently created a Class for Captcha in the hopes of preventing bot/spamming registrations on the Social Network. It may not be as good as some other classes but it should do for now and until I figure out ways to improve it.
At the moment it works by displaying an image with 7 characters on it (it can be increased/decreased) with 2 of the characters being red. The 2 red characters are displayed in random positions through the image sometimes being the first character and other times being the last. The way it works is that the user is prompted to enter the ‘non red’ characters for the code for the Captcha. Hopefully the bots will not be able to figure it out.
In the future I will more than likely make it so that it’ll ask for you not to enter the green or blue or other colour characters to further prevent bots if they are able to pass through it. One more thing which needs to be added is some noise to make the picture harder to see. Its very easy for humans to see at the moment though according to some people testing.
Social Network - Development Pt. 2
At Current:
As with the last post, progress is still going very slowly and the features are slowly being added. As of now most things within the Social Network are the same with the only difference being the addition of 4 profile fields and the user being able to edit their details via the User Control Panel. Settings and Permissions are also editable through the User Control Panel now and more functionality will be added very shortly. Layouts and Themes are yet to be enabled for customisation.
Users also now are able to leave comments/messages to other people who are on their friends lists. It then appears under the persons friends list after being submitted. There are still some tweaks that need to be done to it, as well as some data ‘cleansing’ to prevent any later issues. A comment count for the poster may be added in the future to keep track of the heavy users, or spammers.
The homepage still needs more work as does most other aspects of the system.
Near Future:
Further modification to the User Control Panel and basics in the Administrator Control Panel. Things for the User Control Panel include the editing of themes and disabling/enabling of specific modules to guests/members/friends or disabling for everyone.
Alterations to the various template files also need to be made for valid css. Some minor alterations also for valid xhtml.
Current Lines of Code: 2880
Current Version: 0.0.2a