in reply to Stop Form Hurling

It's not hard to write a script that will, at random group together a set of several images, each containing a number or letter. You would just need to have, for example, 36 small image files in order to display the letters A-Z (from the English alphabet) and 0-9. A little creativity could obscure the character images with visually distinguishable 'noise', that would be adequate to thwart most web spiders. That doesn't really require a module.

For your CGI parameter handling needs, use the CGI.pm module.

But bear in mind that such a strategy for authentication will run amok with the Americans with Disabilities Act people, as well as essentially denying access to anyone who is sufficiently visually impared. It's like hanging a "Handicap not welcome here" sign on your storefront.


Dave

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Re^2: Stop Form Hurling
by Aighearach (Initiate) on Nov 06, 2004 at 06:03 UTC
    First, I agree fully with the part about handicap access, and I think that it should be a show stopper for any moral programmer; even one getting paid for doing such work.

    Second, stringing together images is a bad idea, because you can look at the image names and (presumably) the bot can just translate the image tags to the words. Simple obfuscation might not work. My own preference for a module to do all graphics stuff is Gimp/Perl. The Perl-Server that comes with this moves the graphics processing into a seperate process from the webserver, so you only have the glue in all the apache (or ...) processes. Note however that the locking doesn't work in all versions, so I just flock() a lockfile.


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      I think that it should be a show stopper for any moral programmer; even one getting paid for doing such work.

      It's about as immoral as building a staircase. As long as an alternative is supplied, I don't see a moral problem.

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        That's the whole point, to prevent alternative methods. What do you want to replace the elevator, a wav file spelling the letters? Do you think many projects that use this, budget for that? If that's part of the spec, fine, there is an exception to my statement, but I've seen a lot of these damn things, and I've NEVER seen one with an elevator.

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