Greetings,
Just wanted to reply to thinkdreams comment. Humanauth works by having the images in two separate folders. A "correct" and "incorrect" folder. The script looks at the file names in the folders and automatically creates everything for you. So there is no need to tag anything An image called "green_tree.jpg" will receive a title and alt tag with the text "Green Tree". The underscore becomes a space, the extension is removed and we even capitalize the first letter of each word so it looks nice.
All you really need to do is put whatever images you want in each folder. Currently we placed pictures of nature in the "correct" folder and request users to choose three pictures of nature. You can put whatever pictures you want in there and just update the challenge for your users. There is even a config file so you can make your own folder names and just update Humanauth to whatever you called it.
As long as there is a central theme to the correct images, users will be able to identify them based off the question you ask them. In our example, we just took a bunch of pictures of things found in nature and dropped them in a folder. That was our theme.
Humanauth already comes with these images and you can pretty much just drop it on your server and hook it into your site by using the code on our sample.php page included with Humanauth. Works with PHP4 & PHP5.
We are always available to answer questions too, if you need any help It really is pretty easy. Hope you will give it a try.
- Gigoit Staff
( http://beta.gigoit.org )
@gigoit
wow. i never expected a reply from the actual humanauth people on the zenphoto site. this is pretty cool. i just think it would be a nifty addition to a photo gallery to use the photo gallery images to "validate" a human commenter.
one thing i would like to know is how the best way to hook humanauth into the zenphoto comment architecture. In other words, would you place the humanauth code before the submit comment button on the comment form, or after the submit button is depressed, then it passes to humanauth?
we can take it offline more as well if you want, i am at craig (at) thinkdreams.com. seems like a better place than cluttering up tristan's nice zenphoto board with another off-topic discussion.
No, please please clutter up the board with discussion! That's what it's for! Besides, I like to see what you're up to ;-)
I do like the idea of using photos for authentication, it fits with the application's purpose very well.
However, I have always thought any kind of captcha to be an excessive measure. I believe bayesian filtering is pretty good, especially distributed systems like Akismet. One big downside of Akismet is that it requires a wordpress.com API key... not terribly uncommon for public API's, but still an extra hassle. We could alternatively use a PHP bayesian filter internally, but that's not very effective either with the low numbers of comments you get on a photo album... maybe captcha is ok... :-)
Really, we need plugins. Then we can make all kinds of sp*m filtering as needed.
I know this is naive, but sp*m for most of us is still very low. Zenphoto isn't yet widespread enough to attract much attention, but all that does is buy us time to get some protection.
i do agree with you on the akismet thing. I run my blog using akismet, and it's not that popular of a destination, so I get minimal spam. My wife's business blog and site gets a lot more, because we advertise, so it stands to reason that the amount of spam you get is relative to how popular you are....
captcha works ok as an alternative. i think humanauth is something a bit better since it does use photos. captcha can get annoying to people in some cases, and it definitely is a problem for ADA related issues. i truly cannot stand the random letter captchas.
so i'm glad to hear it's ok to discuss it here. thanks tris.
Askimet is definitely the way to go. On my blog I currently have 340 comments that have been flagged and 'quarantined' as spam (they are automatically deleted after 15 days) and Askimet has caught over 1200 since I installed it recently. I have had maybe 1 or 2 comments slip through the net and to me that is a pretty successful ratio.
I really think we should be trying to encourage browsers of our galleries / photoblogs or portfolios to comment on our images and creating any sort of barrier to entry is not a good idea. Askimet is a non intrusive solution that works, it requires very little administration on the admin's part and I really think it should be utilised in Zenphoto.
@ Tris, I am really glad you are now seriously looking at the plugin facility again, I do appreciate you have been busy with other things. The plugin feature will take a lot of the heat off you and will undoubtedly increase the commercial credibility that Zenphoto deserves. Keep up the great work.
[i]Other than being a bit of Wordpress fanatic, I have no association with Automattic or Wordpress! :-) [/i]
I did a hack to put a captcha image :
http://www.gregserveur.com/public/scripts/zenphoto_comment_protection.zip
OR
http://gregoryb.dyndns.org/public/scripts/zenphoto_comment_protection.zip
I kind of gave up on Humanauth, as I couldn't get any sort of direct response from them. I'll assume they're busy, but I had a few implementation questions that I couldn't get answered.
After much thought, a plugin using Akismet would be the better way to go. Been busy working on my wife's business website, so I haven't had much time to work on it myself, but a good starting point would be:
http://www.achingbrain.net/stuff/akismet/
It's a PHP5 based script for comments using Akismet, which can be plugged into virtually anything. However, without the plugin architecture for zenphoto, it would require much editing of core files, and would make upgrading difficult.
Actually, since this thread was started, I thought about Akismet, but never really had the time to sit down and work on something like this. However, yesterday I learned about Micro-Akismet and so I took the day off of work today to try and work on a ZenPhoto "hack" using Micro-Akismet. We'll see how it goes later today!
@GameDudeX
Let me know if you need an extra server to test with. I'd be glad to help.
Yup. I'm on gmail, so I just use their built in chat function. Works great for me. thinkdreams (at) gmail.com.