phpBB KittenAuth: Documentation
Customizing phpBB KittenAuth
phpBB KittenAuth comes pre-configured with some nice defaults,
randomly asking the user who wants to register one of eight pre-defined
questions regarding twenty images of animals. The default images show
animals like cats, dogs, birds and fishes and ask the user to select
all cats or all dogs, but also to select all farm animals, all animals
that can fly or all animals with four legs. This will make it harder
for computers to pass by this test, because it is also required to understand
the question that is asked about the images that are offered.
The current version is a relatively simple approach that does not use
filename obfuscation nor image manipulation, making it possible for SPAM
bots to store the filenames and hash values of the images to be able to
recognize them later.
Therefore, the main idea behind
phpBB KittenAuth is to make it
extremely easy for the forum administrator to change the configuration
of the visual confirmation system, as it is very unlikely that those
SPAM bots will contain code for single forums (as they are usually targeted
to a large base of identically installed software). Therefore, the forum
administrator can do the following simple tasks to create his very own
version of
phpBB KittenAuth, which will then be very unlikely to
be the target of automated SPAM software:
-
rename the image files
-
change or replace the image files or add more image files
-
change the text of the questions asked about the images
-
change or add new questions relating to different image subsets
To do all these tasks, just edit phpBB KittenAuth's main
configuration file ka_config.php in phpBB's main
directory. Looking at the well-documented configuration file with
the questions about animals as some working examples is the best
way to start! Besides defining images subsets and corresponding
questions, you can also adjust some parameters like the number of
images to select, the number of columns and rows of the image matrix,
the width and height the images should be scaled to, the image border
size and the image border color for selected and unselected images.
(All images that are not referenced by any question in the configuration
file are randomly used as "wrong" choices offered in the image matrix.)
For special-interest forums, it is even possible to use images and questions
that are harder for people to answer that do not know much about the topic
of the forum, making it harder to register even for humans who see the images
and read the corresponding question. (The
Rocks'n'Diamonds Forum
uses such an approach to ask questions that are easier to answer if you have
a little knowledge about that game or similar types of games.)
As a conclusion, phpBB KittenAuth's main intention is not
to create an unbreakable visual confirmation system once and for all,
but to provide forum administrators with an effective tool to easily,
flexibly and immediately respond to spammers that target their forum,
without having to wait for the next-generation standard solution that
will soon be obsoleted by the forum spammers again.
