stupid comment verification code thingy

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Alelou » Tue Jan 31, 2012 5:31 pm

That's when you hit the little refresh button to get a different one before you hit submit.

I'm not a huge fan of the system either, but when in doubt, I keep pressing for another one until I'm pretty sure I can do it.
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Cogito » Tue Jan 31, 2012 5:39 pm

I've also got into the habit of copying my comment to the clipboard before I try to submit it.

Fortunately it usually accepts my comments, but it's extremely frustrating to lose comments when it doesn't.

Am I imagining it, or was there a time when the 'verification failed' page remembered your comment for you?

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Distracted » Tue Jan 31, 2012 6:28 pm

I suppose the point I was trying to make is that complaining about it on a public forum serves no useful purpose. If you think the admins aren't aware of a problem please pm one of us. If the person you pm can't help we can forward it to someone who can. In this case it's a problem we're all aware of and which is being worked on when time permits. We all should routinely copy our posts before submitting until the problem is resolved. It makes no sense to me to both tighten and loosen security at the same time by simultaneously adding a spam blocker to the board and discontinuing the captcha in comments. I would think that doing that might just drive the spammers to the comments instead, but i'm not the expert you are, Kotik. If you have a possible solution I'm sure Elessar or Mjimeyg would be interested in hearing it, but the rest of us can't do a thing about it.

At any rate, i'm sure that there's a perfectly logical explanation for the captcha code system glitches. My suggestion is that you try to be patient while the kinks are beong worked out and do your best not to insult the very people who are working so hard to solve the problem.
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Asso » Tue Jan 31, 2012 6:50 pm

Patience is the virtue of the strong.
At least that's what they say those who are patient. :angel:
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The Ears of the Elves, chapter Forty-four


And here is the beginning of the whole story.
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But, I must say, you could also find something else on Fanfiction.net written by me. If you want.

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Elessar » Thu Feb 02, 2012 6:03 am

Kotik wrote:Ok, now I'm effing po'ed :evil: I just lost a longish comment again because of this ridiculous how-can-i-annoy-my-users-today-capcha crap. Get the hell rid of this this junk! Where the heck is the problem of just tying this to the forum accounts, it's no bloody rocket science for hell's sake! Why is it impossible to keep the comment if the bloody code is wrong? It's a bloody HTML form! As it is now, authors are being cheated out of comments, because, I'm surely not the only one, who cannot be arsed any longer to put up with this ridiculous sh*t! Seriously, get rid of that! No wonder we suffer from site-dryout. Our posting process is random, our forum is overrun by russian spammers and if you want to post a comment, you're annoyed the raw crap out of by a ridiculous captcha thing. Way to go :duh:


We'll look at the capcha system once again to see if there's a way to keep it from deleting your comment when you screw up the captcha, but we're not rebuilding the comment system to connect it to the boards. Yes it could be done. When we originally set up the present comment system, several years ago, we were on a different host and one of the technical limitations was were literally only given ONE SQL dbase. Today that's no longer the case. While the actual construction of a new comment system is not technically daunting, the transferal of all existing comments into the new one is. If you can conceive of a way to automate this, I'm all ears, but I don't think it's feasible. But I don't think authors would be interested in starting over all their comment threads to redo this.
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby putaro » Thu Feb 02, 2012 7:35 am

Elessar wrote:While the actual construction of a new comment system is not technically daunting, the transferal of all existing comments into the new one is. If you can conceive of a way to automate this, I'm all ears, but I don't think it's feasible. But I don't think authors would be interested in starting over all their comment threads to redo this.


A migration when you know what the original schema is and you have control over the design of the new schema is not an issue. The existing comments could be assigned to fake accounts or there could be two fields in the new schema for commenter - a legacy field that kept the old name in old comments and a forum user field for the new comments.
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby putaro » Thu Feb 02, 2012 7:36 am

You could even just leave the old comments db in place and display comments from it along with comments from the new db but new comments are only allowed to be added to the new db. That may be the easiest solution.
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Cogito » Thu Feb 02, 2012 11:29 am

I don't know how the comments are currently stored, but if they're in an SQL database then updating the schema to add an authenticated username column doesn't seem daunting. The front-end changes to allow/require login before commenting seem like the biggest part of the job.

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Kotik » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:31 pm

Elessar wrote:We'll look at the capcha system once again to see if there's a way to keep it from deleting your comment when you screw up the captcha, but we're not rebuilding the comment system to connect it to the boards. Yes it could be done. When we originally set up the present comment system, several years ago, we were on a different host and one of the technical limitations was were literally only given ONE SQL dbase. Today that's no longer the case. While the actual construction of a new comment system is not technically daunting, the transferal of all existing comments into the new one is. If you can conceive of a way to automate this, I'm all ears, but I don't think it's feasible. But I don't think authors would be interested in starting over all their comment threads to redo this.


There's not much need to check the captcha thing because it has nothing to do with it. In This post on Nov. 08th 2010 I outlined all programming that was neccessary to keep the comments in case of a wrong code. On January 05th 2011 it was actually implemented, but in February 2011 it was gone again. There are two possibilities whyt that happened:

1) Someone accidentally overwote the deployed code by a pre-january backup

or
2) someone took it offline again because of slightly shoddy programming. As it was implemented by January 2011 there was a problem that, after the new changes, comments remained in the comment box even after being successfully posted. I suggested the solution for it in this post on jan. 05th 2011. It's basic basic programming 101. With all due respect to whoever is in charge of the php programming, but it's a 5 minute job to correct it.


Jon, your worries about transferring the comments form the current system into a new one are unwarranted. They can be transferred safely into a new scheme, that's the very nature of a relational database like MySQL. You might need a few intermediate temporary tables, but transferring the comments form the current scheme to a new one is definitely possible.The problem that exists is, that the current system is broken. There are more than one story or chapters that display the comments of a completely different story. Since comments are tied to stories and chapters by 1-to-n relations (technobabble: foreign keys) within the database, it is a no-brainer to suspect that exactly those foreign keys are corrupted in some instances, but it should be noted that this is not neccessarily the fault of the programmers. Unless you enable innodb schemes on mysql instances up to versions 5 and below, the server does not support foreign key constraints. These errors would, unfortunately, not be repairable during a migration to a new scheme, but not information would be lost if we implemented a new model for comments.

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Cogito » Tue Apr 10, 2012 7:12 pm

For one reason and another it's been a while since I posted comments against any stories here, and I can only apologise for that. But now when I try to post a comment, the CAPTCHA verification thing looks very different to what I remember. It also displays a comment telling me that I have javascript turned off, which I assume explains why it looks so different.

Here's the thing, though: I have a javascript blocker which lets me control which scripts run, and I have enabled scripts for triaxiansilk.com and recaptcha.net, and blocked google and facebook. It has worked fine like this in the past and I don't understand what's changed. I'm too lazy to try to dig through the implementation to see why the comment verifier is behaving like this, can anyone tell me if this has changed recently?

Kotik

Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Kotik » Tue Apr 10, 2012 8:10 pm

Code: Select all

var RecaptchaState = {
    site : '6LfdyAkAAAAAAOzEMv0cfVQvZad5Huk34L9AUARr',
    rtl : false,
    challenge : '03AHJ_VusMdrh9cNw0C1Gg4wzap8eMqWdKP9Jz1DUSk7JvMsqsv6vJc_lZ7P043hqTIqcYdvnqWsnjXuQ-MI1bsMBmzdsbkB-qnuqsjEPOshAxEBnzCzyONM3Ezj_OoefVB0hzEZladUwskBBKRRGPD7qiuKdHSwxH-Q',
    is_incorrect : false,
    programming_error : '',
    error_message : '',
    server : 'http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/',
    lang : 'de',
    timeout : 1800
};

document.write('<scr'+'ipt type="text/javascript" s'+'rc="' + RecaptchaState.server + 'js/recaptcha.js"></scr'+'ipt>');


As you can see, the script on recaptcha.net actually loads a script on google.com, which explains, why it doesn't work, if you block js gfrom google.

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Cogito » Tue Apr 10, 2012 8:22 pm

Thanks for the explanation, Kotik. I can only suppose that the folks at recaptcha.net have adopted some scripts from google while I was away.

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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Distracted » Tue Apr 10, 2012 8:29 pm

Thank you, Kotik. :D

Let us know if what Kotik suggests doesn't work, Cogito. I have a pm in to the tech wizard to see if he's got any other suggestions.
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Alelou » Tue Apr 10, 2012 8:38 pm

Half of the recaptcha is code you put in is actually helping google digitize old books, so that may be why there's a relationship there now.

But I hope you won't post feedback AGAINST a story anyway. :?
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Re: stupid comment verification code thingy

Postby Distracted » Tue Apr 10, 2012 11:47 pm

Our tech guy agrees with Kotik, so enabling Google should fix your problem, Cogito.
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