Mollom.com website CAPTCHA issue
| Project: | Mollom |
| Version: | 5.x-1.4 |
| Component: | Miscellaneous |
| Category: | support request |
| Priority: | minor |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | closed |
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I am unable to register at the mollom site for the reason which I explained in a message to the Mollom administrators using their contact form. Here is what I said:
----- (message) -------
I am trying to fill in your registration form, (Firefox 2.0.0.9 on debian etch) and the captcha isn't working. The ONLY thing above the input field for the captcha is this line:
Mollom CAPTCHA (play audio CAPTCHA)
I.e., there is no captcha presented to be answered. (and selecting audio captcha results in silence.)
Puzzled,
Ron House
----- (end message) ------
Then the contact form itself said "I think your message might be spam, please answer a CAPTCHA - and, of course, it displayed the exact same dud CAPTCHA on the contact form. Result: I cannot register and cannot report the site error on the site.
Yeah yeah, y'all hava good laugh!!
Cheers!
#1
#2
Priority normal??? What's more critical than that the entire project doesn't work? One cannot register a new website, one cannot expect that the system, once installed, will present CAPTCHAs to users trying to post? If it fails to present readable CAPTCHAs, it doesn't work - at all. The entire project fails to perform its only function. In what sense is that not critical?
#3
A followup: I have since managed to get ONE captcha out of the Mollom website, which I used pronto to register a site. That's one out of over 40 tries. The captcha system just doesn't function, period.
I have tried an experiment by viewing source of a Mollom page, and entering the URL of the captcha graphic into the browser on its own on a page. I get:
The connection was reset
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
Question: has anyone else tried to get a captcha out of the mollom.com site lately? Do you get one? Is this related to geographical location or something?
#4
Unable to reproduce.
#5
By very careful writing of a flowing narrative text, I have managed to get a message direct to mollom.com without being challenged by a captcha, so I will continue to discuss the problem with them.
A thought though, I wonder if this could be something to do with some other spam blocker somewhere reacting to the fact that the captcha graphic is not coming from the same site name as the page itself?
#6
I experienced something similar when I was posting to Dries's blog. My message was never displayed on his website, so clearly it was either flagged as spam or the mollom service was broken. My message was direct, to the point and used proper use of English.
From that point onwards, my trust in mollom was damaged. I decided to try it on a few websites and now using this issue queue to point out any problems I encounter.
@RTH, depending on the response you get from contacting mollom, can you please update this issue's status?
#7
Changed status to minor. After many discussions, in which they were very helpful, the problem was not solved, but we found it was isolated to one computer, for reasons that remain a mystery. I think you are right though about the spam detection. It does flag lots of ordinary stuff as spam.
#8
Sounds like this might be fixed then.
temp
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.
#9
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.
#10
Changing the issue name since it was showing up very high in the google search and makes the project look bad.
#11
@10, 3, 2 && @RTH:
A better description of this issue would have been "I'm having a problem getting Mollum registration to work" instead of "complete failure." Similarly, the critical tag is meant for issues which affect many/most people, not issues that affect just one-- and using it for the latter takes up contributors' precious time and desensitizes to real issues, as it becomes harder to tell what is what.