[Mailman-Developers] CAPTCHA support

[Florian Fuchs]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 16:27:31PM +0530, Aditya Divekar wrote:
>Hi!
>I was looking around the mailman code, and could not find the functionality
>for captcha in the mailing lists subscription pages.
>I think it could be a good feature to implement in the upcoming versions,
>and would like to know if its a good idea?
>I also came across the thread -
>http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.mail.mailman.user/74167
>and read about the previous discussion on it by some members.
>Since captcha back then was easier to break, it might not have been a
>profitable feature, according to the thread.
>But with the new recaptcha, I would like to know if the stand is the same.

There are a number of alternatives to captchas to prevent spam. None of them
is perfect, but one I kind of like is the honeypot approach:

It's basically an empty and visually hidden input field that is ecpected to
be emptily submitted. Most spam bots will try to fill it with some text,
which is the warning flag that can be used to ignore those submits.

The big plus is that it won't require human users to take any extra action,
making it completely unobtrusive to *most* users.

The one major downside is that it might be confusing to users who use screen
readers and to whom this extra input is properly displayed, which might cause
some confusion. Of course, this can be solved somewhat by labelling the field
accordingly, something like "Are you human? Than keep this empty".

Also, I have no idea how sophisticated spam bots are becoming in detecting
honeypots, for instance by only trying to use "known" fields like "username",
"email address" and so forth.

Still, even if this is not a perfect solution, it might still be better than
the big usage impediment of captchas.

As a side-note, especially to those who are using screen readers: What is
your experience regarding the use of JavaScript in current screen readers? Is
this still mostly a no-go for web sites aiming to be accessible or has there
been some improvement?

Cheers,
Florian


>
>Thanks
>
>Aditya
>_______________________________________________
>Mailman-Developers mailing list
>Mailman-Developers at python.org
>https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
>Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3
>Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/
>Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/f%40florianfuchs.com
>
>Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9