CB Antispam released with great protection tools

I'm trying to replace CB Captcha with CB AntiSPAM. Running under Joomla 1.5.26, PHP 5.2.17, CB 1.9, and AntiSPAM 1.0. Using Internal (Code) or Internal (Question), the Captcha will not render (the alt test is displayed). Using Firebug I can see the image tag as:
<img id="antispam_captchaImage" style="height: 40px; width: 382px;" alt="Captcha" src=" www.researchware.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=pluginclass&plugin=cbantispam&action=captcha&func=image&id=antispam_captcha&format=raw ">

Firebug report that the image will not load. Entering the image source URL in new tab produces a JPG image that says:
The image " www.researchware.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=pluginclass&plugin=cbantispam&action=captcha&func=image&id=antispam_captcha&format=raw " cannot be displayed because it contains errors.

I looked for any information on minimum version(s) of image/php libraries, but could not find anything on the web site. Any thoughts?

krileon wrote:

Delighted to see a plugin to combat SPAM, but what we really need is something that can pattern match against registrations data to provide automatic blocks. We get a lot of robotic registrations with pretty consistent patterns: For example:
Name - Sleegrern SleegrernAZ
E-mail - teeptesty@hotmail.com
Username - Sleegrern

The "lastname" will always end in 2 Upper case characters and first, last, and username all match (except for the 2 uppercase characters) OR we get some where first, last, and username all match exactly. These are and a few other repeating patterns are all generated by SPAM-bots out there. A CB plugin that let use set up rules using REGEX patterns for these three fields and block if the pattern is matched would be HUGELY helpful.

You don't need a plugin for this. You've been able to do this for years now. Just add custom regex validation to your fields by editing them in CB > Field Management and setting "Authorized input:" to "Custom PERL regular expression" now add your custom validation to "Perl Regular Expression:". Then they'll never even make it past registration validation and will fall into failed registration attempts and be subject to blocking if you enable and use it.

The REGEX filter was a great idea, but I need to compare patterns in 3 fields (firstname, lastname, and username) and the REGEX works on on the field in question (unless there is a CB trick to refer to other field in a REGEX expression?)

krileon wrote:

We can not block by IP or email domain as the IPs vary widely and the emails are generally hacked accounts on popular email services like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.). The best option would be something to detect the robot generated patterns of name and username and block if the pattern is matched.

Nothing can detect such patterns reliably. What if a legitimate user has 2 upper case letters? You just lost a customer or user due to it. Spam registrations will always be a reality. The idea behind CB AntiSpam is to cut back on them. Human spam bots, like what you're probably experiencing, will always surpass stuff like this because it's a person sitting there inputting the data. Spam bots won't or shouldn't make it past the new captcha in CB AntiSpam so you should be able to completely eliminate automatic bots; you can also use ReCaptcha captcha mode if you like which uses advanced image recognition deterrent techniques.

Any chance you may add a feature like this to the new anit-spam plugin?

Nope.

Or is there any otther way this could be done with existing CB plugin(s)?

In addition to the above you can use CB Auto Actions to check against post data and try to fail the registration. Conditionals has a REGEX operator so you could regex a field value to see if it contains a match to something you don't like then set a $_PLUGIN error which should stop registration using a Code action with PHP Method. Be careful though as simply checking for 2 capital letters at the end of a last name could easily backfire and block many legitimate users.

Conditional sounds like what I need. I'll download and give it a try. Thanks very muchf or these tips!

So with "question mode" does it use it's own questions? Or can we administrate the questions placed in?

Josh Lewis wrote: So with "question mode" does it use it's own questions? Or can we administrate the questions placed in?

You can add your own.

Sweet! Is it case sensitive? Could you have multiple answers?

researchware wrote: I'm trying to replace CB Captcha with CB AntiSPAM. Running under Joomla 1.5.26, PHP 5.2.17, CB 1.9, and AntiSPAM 1.0. Using Internal (Code) or Internal (Question), the Captcha will not render (the alt test is displayed). Using Firebug I can see the image tag as:
<img id="antispam_captchaImage" style="height: 40px; width: 382px;" alt="Captcha" src=" www.researchware.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=pluginclass&plugin=cbantispam&action=captcha&func=image&id=antispam_captcha&format=raw ">

Firebug report that the image will not load. Entering the image source URL in new tab produces a JPG image that says:
The image " www.researchware.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=pluginclass&plugin=cbantispam&action=captcha&func=image&id=antispam_captcha&format=raw " cannot be displayed because it contains errors.

I looked for any information on minimum version(s) of image/php libraries, but could not find anything on the web site. Any thoughts?

Means you likely have a fatal error present. It uses an internal Joomla link to output the image. If you've an error present internally in Joomla then it's going to fail to output the image to the header. Enable debug mode and maximum error reporting then navigate to the captcha URL directly and see if any errors are present. If not review your server error log to see if any errors occurred. The tools checker in backend checks that you meet the requirements (GD2 and TrueType). You can also use reCaptcha if you can't resolve your errors.

Josh Lewis wrote: Sweet! Is it case sensitive? Could you have multiple answers?

No, the codes, questions, and answers are not case sensitive. You can have only 1 answer per question, but you can have as many question/answer pairs as you want so you could have the same question 3 times with 3 different answers, etc..