Re: human validation on post comments - Mailing list pgsql-www

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org
> [mailto:pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Travis Hein
> Sent: 29 March 2006 02:10
> To: PostgreSQL WWW
> Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] human validation on post comments
>

Hi Travis,

> > But apart from its ineffectiveness on spammers, as others have
> > mentioned, capcha excludes blind people. :(
>
> So, what I am thinking, is for us to be WAI compliant, we
> need an option to
> "click here to receive an audible version of this word in the
> image that you
> must type in"
>
> I have not been able to find a good, universal, works in all
> places text to
> speech converter,

Well, we could always use a 'works in one place' one and record the
output.

> so how about, if we (someone with a good voice) pre-records
> each and every
> word in the capatcha word dictionary, (eventually we could
> also do it for all
> languages we support too, but i was thinking if the word was
> "shovel" that
> the voice version of the word could be "s"  "h"  "o" "v" "e"
> "l" . you  know,
> spell out the letters, so that it is more language
> independent. (currently,
> the dictionary for captacha words is english only now too.)

Yes, that seems the easiest way. Simpler yet, perhaps we should make it
a numeric code.

> I would consider using a small database table, for the
> dictionary, to manage
> all the words for the dictionary, as opposed to cluttering up
> a folder in the
> docroot with the audio files?
> The table would have a column for the word, as text, and a
> column for the
> word, as a .wav (or the standard acceptable audio format)
> recorded, spelled
> out by the letters version of this word.

It might be better to keep it all in the filesystem to be honest,
otherwise it'll add a fair bit of load to wwwmaster. In the fs, at least
it will all come from one of the frontend servers.

> then on the captacha image screen, the link "click here to
> get the audio
> version of the word shown in the image button" would be the
> facility to
> retreive the word as a downloadable / playable attachment for
> the user, to
> play, and type the letters back in. From there, the existing
> session captcha
> features would be used.

Yes.

> I recognise that the challenge is to get someone to vocalize
> the dictionary of
> captcha words.
> I have not done this yet, but wanted to get the general
> feedback to if this
> was a good idea.

It's doable, but is it worth the effort? I'm beginning to think not if
we have to prerecord everything rather than being able to generate it on
the fly. Currently I'm only seeing a few spams per day - it looks like
the latest additions to the regexp reject list is working pretty well.

Regards, Dave