OpenArena Message Boards

1) Grant rights to some other people to validate accounts.
2) I don't see why installing recaptcha is impossible, that's surprising some piece of PHP can't be dealt with, let people investigate.
3) If not possible, then migrate from that SMF shit to something more manageable, a forum which doesn't allow you to have a normal use of it has to be thrown.

Quote: "do you really want to completely demotivate the project's only 3d technical artist, animator and creative lead?"

Don't demotivate your WHOLE team either.

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1044

Give me the access for 10 minutes and it gets installed. Personally the latter could be nicer, but I don't care which one will be used.

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2932

1) HELL NO, this requires giving complete admin access rights to others, and given the dramatic hsitory of the community (like self-blanking everything, account self destruction etc) i'm not trusting anybody to this. not to mention the takeover potential and social engineering problems.
2) Because SMF uses FTP access to install and modify modules on the fly. Manual installation involves editing PHP files and that's a hassle, not to mention the risk of me breaking something. also isn't recaptcha not even avalable for 1.1.14?
3) It was not my choice to use SMF. It's SMF or nothing. Deal with it. Be grateful about the e107 use also, or maybe I should go back to plain HTM files for the web site then?

...

You know, dealing with melodramatic posts like this is part of the reason why. You should already know better that the development forum is no place for this.

I might try notCaptcha out, sounds more reasonable than recaptcha. I always hated trying to read the text of a bad word inker, plus i'm gonna do the custom pictures thing anyway, it even sounds like fun!

but then, for every SMF update, i'd have to keep manually applying the mod. This is one of the obstacles I hate. I used to update SMF via the built in FTP access through the admin panel, but for years I no longer had that ability.

and before anyone says this, let me get this out of the way


phpBB is not an option

Oh please, stop being that funny.
Development isn't the place for this, but Club Nub isn't either. So where's the right place in fact ?
You won't deal with issues by closing topics, you only push people getting nervous that way and then you obtain the behaviours of blanking posts you just criticize.
I wasn't sounding melodramatic but sarcastic, you tell about your own motivation, do you need to accumulate motivation for months without being contraried to actually produce something ? Contrary to what you think: people here are trying to push YOU and YOUR PROJECT forward, not to put you down.
When I say "don't demotivate your team" I mean DO NOT STOP ITS INERTIA, which is exactly what happens when you REFUSE to let people work around issues like that silly spambot affair which is just one issue amongst many which could have been dealt by experienced people who came upon this board.
You talk about trust, people who talk about trust always take the problem by the wrong end. Opensource guys are here to collaborate, not to ask themselves if they can trust each other. You can't work if you don't have the ground to do it. I don't care if my ground is smaller or bigger than my neighbour's one, I just want to be able to work on the ground my activity requires, and that's why most people can tolerate leaders (who have the bigger grounds). Opensource is against CONTROL, period.

- Admin access is NOT needed to approve members.
- I brought on multiple and even easier modifications to the registration page which might stop the flood completely already.
- ReCaptcha is a perfectly good system, especially because you are not only verifying you are human but at the same time you help digitalising books. If the image is too hard, there's an 'other image' button.
- You are right not to trust everyone, but I think there are enough trustworthy people around here to install a mod or whatever. Also there is something called backups (which should be taken every few days anyway, ifnot more often), you can always revert and change passwords when someone screws things up. Takes about 4 minutes to put into motion, then you go do something else while it runs, and at the end you generate a new sql dump from phpmyadmin or the admin panel itself (takes another minute or maybe two), and nothing can happen anymore. Setting back a backup takes not much longer ifnot just as long.

I have to disagree with this one. I've did some updates from time to time... and I haven't seen such errors. Of course, I don't deny it's existance but the registration code is still the same from 1.1.6, IIRC, and I doubt it will ever gets updated. Since SMF 1.1 gets only security updates from 1.1.10.

OK, I see your reasons not to give access to the admin panel for anybody, but I have never met an SMF mod which took more time than 5 minutes to install, including custom theme updates. (OK, a custom profiler in SMF 1.1 took an hour to set up because I used it for online RPG character database and that required 40+ fields to set up).

If you use English and not English-UTF8, it will get even easier, because only the theme-template gets involved. Or even that one, neither. (Here lies a big addendum within SMF 2.0, it'll update every theme and every language pack, not just English and the basic themes. Although it adds the English lines for all language packs)

RMF, I don't like ReCaptcha. My reason is simple... I've had plenty problems with connection issues with it. Besides, ReCaptcha needs an account on it's page, and seeing fromhell's steps, I doubt she will get that one. This is why I suggested notCaptcha, it fits much better to her, since it doesn't rely on external places.

I don't get why Cacatoes hates SMF... I never liked phpBB myself... and I wouldn't use any forum software besides SMF, so meh.

I don't hate it at all, that was simple reasoning: if, as fromhell seemed to state, it can't have a proper registration system working (with spambot filter and so on) , then it doesn't fulfil its role, so it's good to be thrown.
Truth is: this forum can fulfil its role (contrary would be surprising).
I'm happy with the current board. I'm not a big fan of phpBB either, and if I need a forum fluxbb usually suits my needs, but that's not the topic.

I've attempted to install notCaptcha manually. It broke registrations completely.


god damn it.

Somewhere along the line it tells me to copy the code in generate_config.php to a new file in notcaptcha/notcaptcha_config.php (security reasons beyond my control can not change this to allow it to generate on the fly). I did exactly that.

There's obviously an error in that file, you may even paste its content here (cleaning passwords if there are).

Tomorrow I'll set up an SMF 1.1.14 for field tests on my own. If this is messy, I figure it out.

hope you're doing it manually

I did it with the generated instructions, the notcaptcha_config's my only roadblock

BTW for those who want me to send them 'smf files' - i'm only using a vanilla installation with loads of themes. I don't have to send or 'give access' to you (btw I don't even have the ability to grant access anyway lol)

maybe a little irc session could also help... ;D

That is the problem.

Replace all \' with pure ' and it will work.

EDIT: Huh, I forgot... Replace $salt with the proposed cookie name.

Thank you. i'll do that in an hour

thanks for being helpful!

half-working. images don't show up but sliders do

reading others experiences lately, apparently it's a php/gd library problem? makes no sense when the default smf captcha shows.

gd problem indeed. god damnit

Sad thing. Although i don't get the exact reason behind it, because it seems to me that GD was installed... yet the error message is the missing imagerotate() function.

Meh.

Yep.

I don't know which distrib the server runs, but if it's Debian Etch as I think, from which that function wasn't available in default gd packages, it's discontinued (http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/) and should be updated.

Not just Debian. Ubuntu never included itn, neither. Somewhere I read that SUSE missed it out, too.

On the other hand, the missing imagerotate function is so common that there are at least 3 different implementations of it using basic PHP and GD functions in the comments of http://php.mainseek.com/manual/en/function.imagerotate.php . By copying any of that into the beginning to Register.php (best are those which starts with ( !function_exists( 'imagerotate' ) ) because those will use the same attributes as the original), the issue could be solved.

Cool! This is the implementation I am using (http://php.mainseek.com/manual/en/function.imagerotate.php#84490). It is working!

Thanks!

I JUST REJECTED A SPAMBOT ALREADY!!! THIS ISNT WORKING I FAILED.

;)

Having a spambot get past a captcha doesn't tell you anything.  See if it slows down the volume of them over the next couple days.  You have to remember that they're working hard to break captchas.

Disable the captcha. IIRC that causes it. But moment.

I think she was joking, I registered using a silly spambot name.

cacatoes! hands off that funny button!!  :o

Great joke, Cacatoes. I just wanted to say that I couldn't find any issue, but meh.

cacatoes, i'm warning you - you'll run out of cakes in no time!

fromhell took 40 cakes.
That's four tens.
And that's terrible.


in other news, one human registered today, and no spambots registered today, and i'll have better sleep too

 :)

let's hope it will continue with a minimum of spambots!

one drawback to this is that I can't just randomly change the forum's theme to something anymore. I only installed notcaptcha to the openarena theme

some days ago we had a bot on our forum too (smf 1.1.14) ;(
but mostly the captchas are too hard for them...

@Peter, I changed something on our registration page after that bot attack (didn't have ftp earlier). Are there still spambots registering?? (I can't check that myself..)

@fromhell: 'attempted getting past the notcaptcha' or 'got past the notcaptcha'?

all fine now iirc.
but maybe i just missed them because nico was faster then me ;D