Last modified: 2014-02-16 03:39:54 UTC
CAPTCHA implementations continue to get under pressure. Some plug-ins to the ConfirmEdit extension may already be considered useless. During the recent days a discussion has taken place [1] which lead to ideas of improving the QuestyCaptcha plug-in which seems to be the strongest CAPTCHA implementation currently available. Since this plug-in requires more administration than the others the proposed enhancements mainly focus on improving it. The proposals are: A) allow maintenance of Q&Ass from the wiki itself. This could ensure that for example sysops can regularly update the Q&As in case a spam bot does get through. (siebrand) B) allow arbitrary selection of of Q&As to be shown for confirmation from the wiki itself. Thus more dynamic variation would be possible without having to invent heaps of new Q&As or to remove them. (kghbln) C) allow statistics on success/fail for Q&As to allow fine tuning. (siebrand) It would be great to see an implementation for this. People will really love you for this. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Extension_talk:ConfirmEdit/SimpleCaptcha_now_useless
Great idea! A) could work by having a list in a wiki page, but you probably want some kind of special UI to enter the stuff. One question can have multiple answers (if there are different ways to spell something) and you might or might not want to allow for capitalization differences. You could also imagine having a type associated with the answer, so that the user gets a slightly different input for text then for numbers. B) If you want to do this, you also need 'enabled' meta data for each question, and might want to have some kind of grouping functionality. At that point I start to wonder if using a wiki page is a good idea. Could work if you store it in a blob of JSON I guess. But you'd need to be vigilant for vandalism to this page then as well. Instead of having one page, you could hijack a namespace like EducationProgram does where you have the dedicated edit UI for each page and use different pages for grouping the questions (ie have an enabled setting on page-basis). C) This should be not be to hard. Just create a table and dump the stuff in it. One question that occurs to me is if you'd log the actual answers or not. Might be interesting to catch stuff like common spelling errors, but might also be a privacy concern (even if it's anon?).
As kgh pointed out to me, http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Interwiki is also a nice approach. My guess is that we can use something very similar, although I have 2 concerns with it: * How would you nicely group stuff? That'd probably require non-trivial deviation from that setup. * Stuff is not revisioned. If someone goes delete it all, have fun adding it again. * Not easy to import/export. Well, you can always do table dump and import it, but this requires access to the db. If it's in wiki pages, it's obviously way more open :)
